Design and Urban Ecologies | Theories of Urban Practice

DESIGN AND URBAN ECOLOGIES THEORIES OF URBAN PRACTICE

COLLECTIVE WORKS 2016

INTRODUCTION by Urban Council: Miodrag Mitrasinovic William Morrish Gabriela Rendón Miguel Robles-Durán Evren Uzer

This collection of 2016 graduate thesis represents the work produced by students completing their studies in the Master of Arts in Theories of Urban practice and Master of Science in Design and Urban Ecologies.

Each thesis integrates extensive interviews, field observations, situated participatory and design-led research, and reflective questioning, expanded through discursive writing and drawing, represented in spatial terms and rooted in everyday situations. Propositions are arrived to through the process of collaboration and coproduction with urban communities, organizations and individuals who are “planning to stay” by seeking ways to remain a valueactive and contributing participants in the ever-evolving spaces of urban society.

The cumulative work presented in this volume was done through countless hours of work with often-marginalized urban communities representing diverse backgrounds, geographies and power positions; with city and state agencies; with numerous not-forprofit partners and the civil society sector; and with small businesses, community-based entrepreneurs, and for-profit partners alike. All this

is done in order to develop counter urban narratives to not only resist forces of marginalization and often dispossession in these contested urban geographies, but to propose courses of urban action that would radically transform urban space into the one of social and spatial justice, cooperation, interdependence, and after all of an actually working democracy.

Together, the graduating students in both urban programs see their collective work as a point of departure in the ongoing struggle to reimagine processes of production of urban knowledge, generate new forms of practice, and expand and deepen our capacity to conceive a different kind of urban space. What kind of ethics, what kinds of knowledge, what kinds of politics, and what types of urban practice are necessary for this project to succeed? These are the types of questions students featured here have attempted to answer in their thesis work.

Unfolding Urban Practice MA Theories of Urban Practice 2016

This year’s TUP theses all focused on the U.S. mainly on New York City, analyzed and/or partnered with civic and not-for-profit practices, created primary research data and utilized multiple data sources to critically address the issues of:

section 1 Theories of Urban Practice MA Program Unfolding Urban Practice by Evren Uzer Theories of Urban Practice MA program focuses on the critical study of design and urban practice in the context of cities, urban space, and urban ecosystems. Theses and other work produced from the program problematize studying and theorizing of mainly design-driven spatial and ecological innovation in the context of social justice, inclusion, and co-production of urban space. These issues are addressed by analyzing urban processes, studying design as a vehicle and a catalyst for bringing together government agencies, community-based groups, civic associations, the non-profit and the private sector in co-creating and transforming urban and ecological networks.

Theories of Urban Practice (TUP) MA Thesis, has seven theses from the 2016 cohort. Each of these works contributes to our understanding and theorizing of urban practice, which includes not only methodological shift but also change in approach from conventional urbanism to understand the urban today and the modes of practices that shape it. The Theories of Urban Practice Program and the body of work that is produced from within broaden our focus from the expert practitioners to a scale that enables us to trace and include the agency and spatiality of collaborative, autonomous and community practices that shape the urban.

• Urban practices that produce inequality and spatial and social injustice and methods to trace these complex ecologies; • Current participatory tools and mechanisms, and those which would enable just access and benefit; and • Urban imaginaries for how civil society and community-driven urban practice can change the urban through cooperation, activism, and advocacy.

In the first group, theses look through technopolitics of militarization and politics of infrastructure systems in relation to the urban, and they bring a transdisciplinary lens and methodological proposal contributing under-researched areas within urban studies.

FaDi Shayya focuses on critical analysis and propositions of militarization and urbanization through intended and unintended uses of a U.S. designed war vehicle, MRAP, and its circulation and impact on urban imaginaries. Monica Gaura, taps into the disciplines of architecture, urbanism, and media studies, provides a visualization and reading on securitization and commodification of the digital public sphere through internet networks and infrastructures of NYC. In the second group, theses research and reflect on the collaborative practices and current participatory tools and mechanisms in public transportation, affordable housing provision, and arts led revitalization. Demetra Kourrisova questions the technological determinism inherent within participation in NYC’s public transportation, and she reflects on and suggests a framework for participatory practices in transit planning using Staten Island, NYC, as her casestudy. Travis Bostick inquires about current affordable housing processes through the lens of historicizing ghettoization processes in East New York. Samara Lentz follows an ongoing civic and governmental effort on arts-led revitalization efforts in Trenton, New Jersey, and critically engages in art, art making, creative city and arts district as a method.

The third and last group looks ahead by analyzing current and past urban practices as a basis to construct urban imaginaries for how civil society and community-driven urban practice can change the urban through cooperation, activism, and advocacy. Jasmine Vasandani, engages in solidarity networks and worker cooperatives and proposes their

collaboration and production practices as an emergent strategy, borrowing from science fiction literature. She utilizes Emergent strategy to understand and frame ways of New York City’s worker cooperatives to remain resilient in the face of change and oppression. Ravi Govada proposes a methodological approach to analyze constituency building and advocacy, particularly focusing on the discussions, processes and actors that realized the bike lanes in NYC. He addresses the gap of practice by looking at different partners’ actions and discourses and proposes a path for constituency building.

During a yearlong thesis process, TUP students began working with Jilly Traganou and myself in Fall 2015 by exploring their research interests in intersection with a critical mode of analysis and an inquiry into urban practice. They collaborated and exchanged ideas within smaller student-initiated groups that expanded to Design and Urban Ecologies and the wider community of The New School graduate students and faculty.

In Spring 2016, the students narrowed down their research interests into focused inquiries together with me and the valuable contributions of secondary advisors from The New School community.

The distinguished list of secondary advisors and other contributors to TUP 2016 theses (listed alphabetically): Benoit Challand, Associate Professor of Sociology; Stephen Collier, Associate Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program in International Affairs; Melanie Crean, Assistant Professor of Communication Design, and Technology; Peter Hoffman, Assistant Professor of International Relations; Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism; Victoria Marshall, Assistant Professor of Urban Design; William Morrish, Professor of Urban Ecologies; Miguel RoblesDuran, Assistant Professor of Urbanism; Gabriela Rendon, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning; Mary Taylor, Assistant Director at The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, CUNY, and Director of Development and Communications at the Center for Urban Community Services (CUCS); Jilly Traganou, Associate Professor in Spatial Design Studies; and Albena Yaneva, Professor of Architectural Theory and Director of the Manchester Architecture Research Centre at the University of Manchester Theories of Urban Practice MA graduates take the complicated and challenging task of creatively defining urban practice and actionable theory in a constantly changing urban world and field of urbanism, making significant contributions to the continuing production of practice and knowledge.

Transforming the ‘Ghetto’

This inquiry seeks to understand how histories of ghettoization impacted community agency in engaging the East New York community about the impending rezoning proposed by Mayor DeBlasio’s administration. There has been much interest throughout NYC about what proposed rezonings will mean for existing communities in the target areas. The proposals presented to various community boards throughout the city have resoundingly responded “No” after their reviews of the plans. Many have made recommendations for changes that would improve the plan, and organizations have mobilized to protest the plans primarily because many believe it will accelerate gentrification processes in historically disadvantaged neighborhoods. One of the proposed targets areas, East New York, has stood out because it is: 1) the first target area slated for rezoning; and 2) there appears to be a lack of visible localized community participation occurring in response to the rezoning plan. In this research, I discover that, in fact, there is organizing occurring; however, this organizing is ineffective at mobilizing the broader community. An hypothesis put forth in this investigation is that the conditions under which East New York was ghetto-ized, namely

01.

Transforming the ‘Ghetto’: A Changing East New York by Travis Bostick

This inquiry seeks to understand how histories of ghettoization impacted community agency in engaging the East New York community about the impending rezoning proposed by Mayor DeBlasio’s administration. There has been much interest throughout NYC about what proposed rezonings will mean for existing communities in the target areas. The proposals presented to various community boards throughout the city have resoundingly responded “No” after their reviews of the plans. Many have made recommendations for changes that would improve the plan, and organizations have mobilized to protest the plans primarily because many believe it will accelerate gentrification processes in historically disadvantaged neighborhoods. One of the proposed target areas, East New York, has stood out because it is: 1) the first target area slated for rezoning; and 2) there appears to be a lack of visible localized community participation occurring in response to the rezoning plan. In this research, I discover that, in fact, there is organizing occurring; however, this organizing is ineffective at mobilizing the broader community.

An hypothesis put forth in this investigation is that the conditions under which East New York was ghetto-ized, namely the confluence of real estate practices and discriminatory housing policy, have substantially contributed to the development of an urban community with weak ties.

they collude to create the ‘ghetto’ we have come to understand as East New York. I contend that the processes of ‘ghettoization’ have led to a community contemporary of weak social ties, resulting in the prime conditions necessary for gentrification processes to re-make the ‘ghetto’.

The inquiry finds that the collusion of real estate practices and urban policies contribute extensively to the making of the ‘ghetto’.

Additionally, that the weakening of communities through these processes results in a community primed for the emergence of additional egregious real estate that drive up housing costs and create the conditions for displacement. The inquiry finds that the proposed rezoning in East New York lacked a community-led approach for addressing the rezoning.

The black American ‘ghetto’ has remained an understudied phenomenon in ‘urbanism’.

The common narrative is often broad and high-level looking generally at policies such as urban renewal. Race prejudice is implicit in these phenomena. This inquiry seeks to posit the process of ‘ghettoization’ —or ghettomaking — into contemporary urban discourse.

The central argument is that the historical processes of ‘ghettoization’ has implications for the conditions under which impoverished communities undergo gentrification.

‘Ghettoization’ provides a more explicit way in which to posit race prejudice into contemporary urban discourse. I consider the rezoning of East New York in this inquiry, specifically looking at the history of prejudicial real estate practices and policies and the ways in which

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The inquiry finds that the collusion of real estate practices and urban policies contribute extensively to the making of the ‘ghetto’.

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02.

The Urban OS: Digital Layer Infrastructure and Implications, New York City by Monica Gaura

By now, we are all familiar with the scenes of the hybrid networked city overrun by personal technology. We know what it’s like to walk into a cafe filled with patrons on laptops. We know what it’s like to crash into a pedestrian on the street whose attention is on their cellphone, or speak to an unresponsive passerby listening to their headphones. We idealize the times before everyone was distracted by their devices, but we are also far from willing to give them up. These powerful tools connect us to invaluable amounts of information and social connections, and add a complex digital layer onto our environments.

But do we really have a grasp on how this layer is being built, administered, and controlled?

everyday data, a spatial desire for proximity to its connection points, as well as both exploitation and cooperation between public and private entities for surveillance and social knowledge.

Unlike the spatial component of the city, (designed by architects, planners, and zoning officials), or the political fabric, (dictated by elected officials and at least relative public input), the digital network is being overlaid onto the urban via a complex mix of drivers and strategies that have yet to be comprehended by the people connecting to it.

Government agencies, tech companies, private and commercial organizations, real estate developers, nonprofits, business improvement districts and autonomous organizations are all working with and against each other in an attempt to provide a service that they would like to be just as, (if not more), beneficial to them as it is to its users. We are not only consumers of this network, we are continuously providing information back into it. Our personal technologies are embedded with our digital identities: our interests, locations, search histories, and preferences are being logged and fed back into a system that may either take that information to create a city filled to the brim with hidden commercialization and surveillance, or one that is very in tune with its citizens needs.

Utilizing technical research, open data mapping, creation of actor networks, diagramming, modeling, and critical analysis, I unpack the digital layer of the built environment by dissecting the way our information travels through the city’s public wifi network. How does public wifi change the urban condition?

My argument is that this network has created a market based on the commodification of

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... this network has created a market based on the commodification of everyday data, a spatial desire for proximity to its connection points...

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03.

Building Momentum Through Advocacy, Data and Organization. by Ravi Govada

The perpetual change that cities endure at times can seem to be an outcome of a topdown process where governance and powerful private sector interests are at the helm. Political lobbying, corruption, and greed are all apt adjectives to describe such a process where civic society and neighborhood issues are stifled and unable to compete with the bigger pockets of the higher-ups. While the essence of this embellishment holds true, it is valuable to question the value gained from such a linear, top-down perspective for how cities are shaped.

A linear characterization deemphasizes the multiplicity of actors, issues or events that converge towards significant transformations in the urban landscape.

NYC’s tumultuous relationship with bicycles from the mid to late 1980’s up to the mid to late 2000’s (prior to the concerted effort by the Bloomberg Administration to an ambitious system of bike lanes) serves as a case to further study to understand the power of such movements – in this case multiple battles, conflicts, and demonstrations. Bike lanes in NYC can be traced back to the Late 1800’s and early 1900’s, but their proliferation from 2005 to present (2015) was dramatically accelerated through several strategic urban policies under NYC’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

This study explores strategies of constituency building by taking a closer look at the recent history of bike lanes in NYC and different constituencies, movements, and organizations that played a pivotal role for bikes and their place in the city. Movements, organizations and policies such as Critical Mass rides, 1987 Midtown Bike Ban, Street Memorial project, Streetsblog, Time Up!, and Transportation Alternatives among others all played a part in the bike lane projects all around NYC. This study also delves into the multiple themes and rhetoric advocated and organized for during this time including how rhetorical appeals evolved over time.

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...different constituencies, movements, and organizations that played a pivotal role for bikes and their place in the city.

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04.

Subway Politics: Aiming Towards Public Participation in Transit Planning. by Dimitra Kourrisova

The main purpose of this study is to suggest a framework for public participation practices in transit planning, using Staten Island, NY as a platform for assessing participatory methods performed by the MTA as part of their “Comprehensive Staten Island Bus Study.”

While citizen participation in planning (on the neighborhood scale) has been a vocal part of discussions since the 1960’s, mass transit has been primarily considered a technical issue, entangled in quantitative data and cad simulation analysis, lacking an understanding of the direct effect it has on the social transformations taking place in the city. Studies often result in policies driven by technical data that are difficult for the average person to understand, let alone participate in the process of what makes a public transit network. The restrictive nature of the discipline is confined within a “technological determinism” (Urry, 2007) that ignores the underlying complex processes of human behavior. In the words of Kaufmann, “there is too much transport in the study of travel and not enough society…”

The case of Staten Island is used as a tool to evaluate the need for public participation in transit planning and to assess the level of engagement necessary for collecting meaningful feedback from the public. Furthermore, this study aims to unfold certain processes of transit making, by assessing MTA’s interdependency with agencies that regulate or study issues of transit within the City of New York, while critiquing their involvement in public participation practices vs top down formal policy making. To what extend is the MTA actually responsible for transportation related development decisions? What drives these?

What is their agency, what is their rationale? Do they make efforts for public outreach? How do they involve (if at all) the public in important transportation decisions? Policies are written to sit on shelves of numerous agencies who deal with transportation as if they were dealing with a lifeless form of technology infrastructure that does not relate to citizens who actually use public transit. In addition, the term public should probably be redefined in the context of transit, since factors such as availability and pricing, make it exclusionary for certain groups

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of people. With income levels close to poverty, transportation costs have become the second largest expense after housing for lower income populations (FTA, 2015). Part of this study addresses the development of NYC transit as a system that has historically excluded the city’s working class while assessing its nature today as a “public” transit network.

The Urbanist is seen as an investigator of urban processes, an interventionist between the governing bodies and communities affected by socio-political conditions within the urban environment. In the case of transit, I see the urbanist as someone who aims to complicate the relationships of transit development processes and urban planning policy as part of an interdependent, integrated network that is directly correlated to issues of social equity within the urban. In addition, he/she challenges the classical notion of transportation science, challenging its “technological determinism” (Urry, 2008), one that focuses on raw data collection and computerized traffic simulation by exploring the value of public participation as a vital component of a planning process that aims for the creation of socially inclusive networks.

as a tool to evaluate the need for public participation in transit planning and to assess the level of engagement necessary for collecting meaningful feedback from the public.

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GROUP 5

05.

Places for Art in a ‘Broken’ City: An alternative to ClassCreativity and the archetypal arts district in Trenton, NJ by Samara Lentz

Cities worldwide are turning to the arts to revitalize urban spaces by making them more ‘Creative’, according to the ‘best practices’ of a model that is undergoing rapid ideological uptake despite limited empirical research. This ‘Creative Class’ theory positions art, artists, artistic businesses and arts organizations as amenities, useful in attracting tourists and professionals working in high-growth sectors who have alternative tastes and disposable incomes. Their critical mass is said to reinfuse urban spaces with vitality, but their presence also make cities expensive, leading to the displacement of indigenous residents, businesses, and artists. Once popular and successful, ‘authentic’ and artful places can become homogeneous, generic, and commercial, and though the Creative Class model claims tolerance to be vital to its formula, many top ranked cities for artistic experiences are also the most socio-economically segregated. ‘Creativity’ places ‘art in the city’ in question. When seeking arts-related strategies for improving life in a city, how do decision makers and constituents distinguish ideas that might benefit communities from those that might eventually harm them?

According to Creative Class research, the Trenton metro (Mercer County) is home to a high concentration of ‘Creatives’, but it is also among the most socio-economically segregated places in the nation. Within this context, Trenton seeks to become an arts destination, and its first official task is to establish an Arts District downtown. I analyzed the community-engaged process for planning Trenton’s district, and found that the Creative Class ideology profoundly impacted its design. Proponents of the new district claim that it will benefit the whole city, and yet, a critical mass of arts activity does not fall within its proposed boundaries, or anywhere in the city.

Research generated from planning activities reveals that arts activity is dispersed city-wide.

In light of this, does an arts district speak effectively to the needs of the city?

1934, Dewey probed what he calls a ‘gaping discontinuity’ in the human experience and understanding of art. Instead of being placed behind museum glass, and gazing upon it as an externality of culture, he argued that art be placed back into the context of human experience. At the same time that an arts district connects urban culture to art by way of the city itself, it also removes it from common experience, by placing it behind a boundary, a bureaucracy, a hierarchy, and an intent to sell a product. Dewey’s aesthetic ideal, when transitioned to the urban domain, is a useful complement to Creative Class critique when vetting ideas for arts based urban practice.

Before considering an alternative, I look toward key moments in the city’s industrial and post industrial past to probe its nearly century-long decline for insight concerning its revitalization.

Then, I turn to urban and aesthetic theory, as well as cases from Creative places now struggling to remain affordable, authentic, diverse, and equitable, in order to interrogate archetypes of the Creative City that Trenton’s plan engages. From this analysis I derive a proposition for the development of creative geography in Trenton by way of a process that is alternative to Class-Creativity and the archetypal district. To this aim I utilize Dewey’s aesthetic ideal to consider potentialities that facilitate equitable connections between art, people, and urban culture from the bottom up, engage art in the everyday process of urban life, and help to improve city neighborhoods through artistic means that more directly cultivate a less divided, more inclusive vision of a working class capital city.

To evaluate Trenton’s plan, and the process through which it was produced, I engage critical viewpoints and contradictions concerning art in the Creative City, and explore them in context with the aesthetic theory of John Dewey. In

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... gaping discontinuity’ in the human experience and understanding of art.

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06.

Leave No MRAP Behind A Critical Materialist Account of Urban Imaginaries of Post-9/11 U.S. and Middle East by FaDi Shayya

The 21st century’s surge in violence against urban areas is a signature of an increasing securitization of all domains of life through growing technophiliac military strategies and expulsions of capitalist political economies.

This situation is specific to the U.S. and Western countries’ new colonial politics against urbanities and ecologies of the Global South, and against ‘second-class citizens’ and marginalized/ dehumanized groups within those Western countries.

The recent circulation of the U.S. military’s Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles from the warzones in Afghanistan and Iraq into the U.S. domestic territory and its law enforcement institutions is one outcome and feature of violence against urban areas. The MRAPs were designed to secure U.S. soldiers’ bodies (as U.S. citizens) and expertise (as U.S. R&D investment) against dehumanized bodies and lives of soldiers and citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq. But eventually, the MRAPs return ‘home’ and get allocated to law enforcement only to perpetuate structural discrimination and violence against lines of class, race, gender, and nationality in the U.S. On 1 May 2015, one MRAP Caiman vehicle that once traversed the urban areas of Afghanistan or Iraq showed up in Sheriff outfit in Baltimore, MD to pacify and control Black Americans protesting against police brutality and the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MI on 9 August 2014.

This MA thesis documents and investigates post-9/11 militarization processes in the U.S. and how technomilitary strategies learn about/from urbanization in the Global South only to ‘administer’ the lives, bodies, and resources of its inhabitants and eventually the lives, bodies, and resources of U.S. ‘second-class citizens’ under rubrics of ‘homeland security’. The central focus of the thesis is the MRAP program (2006-2012) that embodied the values of military technoscience, eminent post-9/11homeland security, Cold War legacies, and the colonial power of the U.S. political and corporate economies. From waged warfare that creates the need for MRAPs, to the rapid acquisition process that designs and procures them, to the techno-material failure of the vehicles in the warzone, and all the way to the military-industry-commercial-corporate relations that produce the political economic circulation, the MRAPs become embodiments of imaginaries of security, heirs of systemic and structural violence, and militarized commodities with social lives that shapes urbanization in the warzone and at home.

situations, and it employs diverse methodologies from thick description, to genealogy, media content analysis, and mapping. The thesis is structured in four interdependent chapters, a framing introduction, and a reflective conclusion that presents critical analysis and propositions about the ongoing dynamic relations between militarization and urbanization.

The following five themes are discussed across the thesis and addressed in the conclusion: 1) Engaging with the Technomilitary Field: an analysis necessary to deconstruct how contemporary technoscience works handin-hand with power (state, corporate, and non-state actors) to shape the spatial and political urban realms in Western and nonWestern geographies; 2) Reading Warfare beyond Haussmannization: upon the “urban turn” in RMA (Graham 2008) and the blurring of boundaries in urban warfare (Weizman 2012), an analysis of urban environments becoming the complex socio-spatial medium subject to the hegemony of militarized hi-tech network-centric triangulation and beyond the conventional lens of Haussmannization; 3) Recognizing the Non-Binary Relation of Securitization and Militarization: an analysis of securitization as the issue and militarization as a (major) subset of the issue that opens up an introspection into the future of urbanities as elastic spatio-territorial and juridico-legal spaces of heavily-securitized sociality where strategies of Homeland Security and Defense merge into each other; 4) Thinking about the Evolving Relations between Violence and Urbanization: an analysis of how to engage with understanding structural violence beyond state monopoly and with increasing blurring of military-civilian technosocial relations to stand up against violence in an age of urban warfare and ‘everywhere war’; and, 5) Urban Citizenship and Resistance: an analysis of what links the previous reflections and a call for action for further revealing research on what constitutes the core of such studies of urbanization, militarization, securitization, and violence: people, that is urban citizens.

The research approaches military strategy and material technoscience as a series of attempts and failures that unfold in a multiplicity of

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...the complex socio-spatial medium subject to the hegemony of militarized hi-tech network-centric triangulation and beyond the conventional lens of Haussmannization...

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07.

Science Fiction as a Cooperative Strategy by Jasmine Vasandani

This thesis proposes a community organizing strategy borrowed from Octavia Butler’s science fiction novels to theorize ways for New York City’s worker cooperatives to remain resilient in the face of change and oppression. In 2015, New York City Council distributed the largest municipal funds in the United States towards worker cooperatives through a program called the Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative (WCBDI). Now in its second year of funding, the WCBDI will have helped create over 40 new worker cooperatives and provided support to worker cooperatives that existed prior to the onset of this program. Worker cooperatives are democratically run businesses that are run for and by the workers, or workerowners. Unlike a traditional business where a boss makes decisions on behalf of their employees, worker cooperatives operate on the premise of one worker, one vote, where all worker-owners own a share of the business, profits are distributed based on patronage, and decisions are made based on democratic consensus. Any business can be a worker cooperative, and they can still provide the same goods and services as traditional businesses.

The main and primary distinction between worker cooperatives and other businesses is that they provide meaningful and communitybased opportunities for ownership for all demographics. In New York City, 99% of worker owners are women from minority groups, particularly Hispanic and Black. Of the entire population of worker owners in this city, 97% do not have college degree but are still receiving higher wages in their industries compared to non-cooperatively-businesses in the same industry. Sounds great, right? Well historically in the US, worker cooperative movements have all been seen to fail for many reasons: economic crashes, shifts in political climate, lack of institutional support.

How can New York City’s worker cooperative movement survive this time around? Through my observations, I’ve noticed that currently and historically, not enough attention has been paid to creating a community around the actual worker cooperatives. A majority of existing literature and public dialogue around worker cooperatives includes discussion around worker cooperative support institutions rather than the

actual worker cooperatives themselves. Thus, communities of support have been created around worker cooperative support institutions and not worker cooperatives. Since worker cooperatives are essentially both community-run and for-profit businesses, traditional modes of business marketing will not help promote their longevity. Rather, a cooperative strategy—and one that can be used to remain resilient in the face of economic crashes, right-wing political dominance, and lack of institutional support—must be used by worker cooperatives in order for them to finally achieve longevity. The most obvious place to search for this particular strategy came to me through reading science fiction, particularly the works of the first and most prominent Black female author, Octavia Butler. Particularly in Butler’s Parable series, Lauren Olamina, a young Black girl, fights political, social, and economic oppression in a war-torn future in the United States through establishing meaningful relationships with individuals and creating a resilient community. The strategies that Butler’s characters utilize in many of her books have been codified by science fiction scholar and social justice activist Adrienne Maree Brown, who created the concept of emergent strategy.

Brown uses Butler’s works as case studies to determine emergent strategies that can be used in real-life settings to build communities in the face of oppression and change. Using emergent strategy as a way to build resilient communities of support for worker cooperatives therefore has the potential of seeing worker cooperatives survive throughout time. This thesis is thus proposes a new way for building strong, vibrant, and meaningful cooperative communities in New York City.

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... Using emergent strategy as a way to build resilient communities of support for worker cooperatives therefore has the potential of seeing worker cooperatives survive throughout time.

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BIOS Travis Bostick

Monica Gaura

Ravi Govada

is an urban and social researcher possessing experience with various qualitative methods and policy. He possesses a Bachelor of Arts from Bard College, with a concentration in Social Policy. Travis is interested in the ways in which the historical legacies of race prejudice in social and urban policy have produced inequity for communities of color.

is originally from a rural hilltop lake community in Northern NJ, Monica moved to Philadelphia to study architecture.. Alongside studying in the MA Theories of Urban Practice program, she is also working at a large architecture firm, enabling her to maintain current knowledge of modern day design practices while bringing back a more well rounded view of urban issues into her professional projects.

is an American-born Indian who grew up in Hong Kong. He received his BA in Communication from Purdue University. Upon earning his undergraduate degree, he returned to Hong Kong where he worked in marketing and communications for a year before starting work with an urban design and planning firm. Ravi gained a passion for urbanism and began contributing on various projects with research, stakeholder engagement and planning strategies and came across the MA Theories of Urban Practice program while searching for a cutting-edge graduate program.

Dimitra Kourrisova

Samara Lentz

FaDi Shayya

holds a BA in architecture from the City University in Birmingham (2009) and a Postgraduate Diploma in architecture from the University of Nicosia in Cyprus (2012). Her work in architecture has been greatly focused on environmental sustainability and designing with renewable materials and energy. Currently she focuses on public transportation in NYC, more specifically investigating the value of public participation in transportation planning.

is an artist-turned-urbanist. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Art History with a minor in Fine Arts and concentration in Cultural Anthropology at the College of New Jersey. As an undergraduate, she turned to the city to gauge more crucial applications for her study of art, outside of the studio, the museum, and self expression. She obtained a position with the State of New Jersey and pursued graduate studies to deepen her understanding of the city and further interrogate contexts for the arts and culture within it.

FaDi Shayya’s current work focuses on ecologies of militarization and urbanization, and earlier engagements include work on urban governance, public space, master planning, and civil society expertise in the Middle East.

Trained in urban theory, architectural engineering, and design, he coproduced the book At the Edge of the City (2010), held senior positions at Dar Group and UN-ESCWA, and directed the Beirut-based research collaborative Discursive Formations (2008-2013).

Jasmine Vasandani was born in the Philippines, raised in southern California, and is of SindhiSouth Asian descent. Jasmine moved back to the US to pursue an MA in Theories of Urban Practice at The New School where she is writing her thesis on science fiction--borrowing particularly from community-building strategies used by the characters in Octavia Butler’s novels--as a way to build cooperative communities in New York City.

section 2 Theories of Urban Practice MA Design and Urban Ecologies MSC Ecologías Urbanas de San Roque, Quito by Miguel Robles-Durán

Centering on critical urban issues such as gentrification, displacement, housing, property rights, redlining, crime, poverty, education, economy, informality, homelessness, and discrimination by race, gender and age, the San Roque Thesis Collective, composed of six students from the MS in Design and Urban Ecologies and two students from the MA in Theories of Urban Practice, dedi-cated a full year to research, theorize, critique and develop urban intervention strategies related with the imminent re-structuring of the urban ecology surrounding the Mercado San Roque, a traditional food market at the periphery of Quito’s historical center, designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

Together with our Ecuadorean partners from the Ministry of Culture of Ecuador, the Frente de Defensa y Modernización del Mercado de San Roque, the Red de Saberes del Mercado de San Roque and the Centro Nacional de Estratégia para el Derecho al Territorio (CENEDET), the students were tasked with substantial team efforts to conduct secondary source, ethnographic and open fieldwork research, in order to produce a conceptual frame that translated to an operative agenda that could realistically support, through design interventions, critique and theoretical arguments the many different urban struggles that the students decided to focus on: Sascia Bailer and Sinead Petrasek, both students from the MA in Theories of Urban Practice decided to team up to look into the new forms of art practice that emerged with the uprise of po-litical activism since Rafael Correa became the President of Ecuador; the San Roque market, be-ing one of the epicenters of these new cultural manifestations, provided a perfect platform for them to understand, critique and develop new perspective on the changing cultural policies and their effect on the most vulnerable members of its urban ecology.

Mateo Fernández Muro and María Morales from the MS in Design and Urban Ecologies, worked together with members of the Pueblo Kitukara indigenous community and many other local activists, politicians and academics to develop economic and geographical tools that could aid in the search for more autonomy and selfmanagement of the Comunas (where the Pueblo Kitukara and other indigenous groups live) inscribed within the urbanized limits of Quito.

Tait Mandler and Gamar Markarian focused on the historical contradictions that surround the economic development of Quito’s traditional food markets by looking at the unequal distribution of landownership, food value chains and food monopolies; their project, rooted in traditions of critical pedagogy, was developed

in conjunction with many different local actors, as an attempt to catalyze radical conversations about the need to expand the existing forms of urban activism into other larger and trans-scalar fields.

Masoom Moitra, also from the MS in Design and Urban Ecologies, dedicated her full year to research gender relations and child rearing opportunities inside the Market’s ecology; through a sophisticated assembly of different local and NYC social relationships and networks, Masoom developed and piloted with the support of the Queens Museum and their Immigrant Movement International, an alternative after school program for a bilingual school (Quechua and Spanish) in the San Roque market and in NYC. And lastly, Alexandra Venner decided to unpack the making of a world class tourist destina-tion, the state and local government’s ambitions to capitalize on their UNESCO heritage status and the many socio-spatial contradictions that have emerged with the coming of this new indus-try; Alexandra, together with the our local partners Red de Saberes, decided to craft a visual nar-rative as a critical pedagogical tool to look into and revert the dire consequences of one-dimensional tourist policies that have been characteristic of the last decade of urban development of Quito.

This thesis project will be presented at the Aronson Gallery at Parsons School of Design in Spring 2017 and at the Peoples Alternative Social Urban Forum taking place at the same time as the United Nations Habitat III conference in mid August 2016. Here, the team will present to-gether with our local partners, the complete thesis project as radically new directions towards more just forms of urban development.

The project is thankful for the incredible support of Ana Rodrigues, Culture Minister of Ecuador; Henar Diez, Senior Advisor of the Culture Minister; the complete teams of Red de Saberes and the Frente de Defensa del Mercado de San Roque; the re-searchers at CENEDET; the Pueblo Kitukara; Hector Grad; David Harvey; Martha Rosler; Malav Kanuga; Mary Taylor; Sakiko Sugawa and Rob Robinson.

01.

Red de Mercados: Pedagogies for Action in Quito’s Public Markets by Gamar Markarian & Tait Mandler

Quito’s public markets are sites of contestation and struggle, both between social groups inside and between the markets and the city’s urban revitalization programs. In order to confront the forces of government policy and international capital-driven urban development, a group of leaders representing worker and vendor organizations in a few of Quito’s public markets have been attempting to create a solidarity network. However, spatial and social divisions between and within the markets have made it difficult to construct the meaningful, actionable, and lasting connections necessary for such a network.

Our thesis proposes a critical pedagogical project, driven by community media creation, to support this already emerging network of solidarity. Following Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, we have designed an ensemble of tools and frameworks to open up potentials for the emergence of a collectively created market worker (including vendors and wage laborers) identity that can serve as a foundation for collective action in defense of the public markets.

Our thesis is organized into four sections.

The first is a brief introduction to Quito’s markets and our project direction. Section 2 consists of our historical analysis of the uneven distribution of land ownership in Ecuador, the development of a theoretical perspective focused on politics and counter-politics of scale that offers potentials for both analysis and action, and a demonstration of such a perspective in the tracing of the potato value chain of the Ecuadorian Sierra. In Section 3, we review the struggles and problematics that became most salient to us during our fieldwork, present our own perspective on their connections to the uneven distribution of land ownership, and summarize the structure of two social movements based on reclaiming land ownership through a politics of scale: Genuino Clandestino and Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement.

Finally, Section 4 presents our design proposal for a community pedagogical project that supports inter- and intra-market solidarity.

Our tools include a short documentary representing the information and perspectives we gathered during our initial visits, a diagrammatic representation of the potato value chain that demonstrates how a scalar perspective can reveal connections between seemingly disparate social issues, and the creation of a short animation that recounts the history of increasingly uneven land ownership in the Sierra.

Our project framework combines Freire’s dialogical, problem-posing, and self-reflective pedagogy with methods in community film making, including supporting individuals’ self-documentation of their everyday lives and walking with video exercises. The iterative process of recording, editing, screening, and discussing will, we hope, open up spaces for self and collective reflection on how the diversity of people and groups in the markets can create stronger connections of solidarity.

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... a critical pedagogical project, driven by community media creation, to support this already emerging network of solidarity.

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02.

The Communes of Quito as a Collective Inhabitation of Territory: Imagining selfgovernance tools for an emancipatory urban production by María Guadalupe Morales & Mateo FernándezMuro *In collaboration with Pueblo Kitu Kara and the future Federation of Communes of Ilaló-Lumbisí

Regulated as legal entities under the 1937 Communes Law, yet always in a decreasing number, today there officially exist 49 active communes in the Metropolitan District of Quito.

Our research, based both on field trips and recent academic literature, focuses on the legal framework, internal organization and property regimes either sustaining or threatening their existence. These politically autonomous bodies with indigenous roots have been granted with territorial authority in the last Ecuadorian Constitution, approved in 2008. At a discursive level, the latter provides them of collective selfdetermination rights founded on the collective ownership of their territories, their own forms of internal direct democracy and the communal character of their social relationships. However, at a more material level, and due to a various number of incongruences, legal voids and contradictions between the different regulations protecting them, they have been rendered almost invisible to the eyes of the State and the Municipality. Officially appearing as single points in the map, without a territorially defined footprint, they have been devoid from any legal power and any actual capacity to exert their collective rights, and have become weak fragmented entities vulnerable to capital pressures and accelerated urban expansion processes.

One of the most recent urban ordinances that has refused to recognize the territorial authority of the communes is the “AIER Ilaló-Lumbisí”, approved by the municipality with speculative purposes but to allegedly protect the Ilaló hill.

This latest violation of the communal rights has triggered both the restructuration of a strong indigenous ethno-genetic process, carried out by Pueblo Kitu Kara, and the arising of a political movement for the creation of the Federation of Communes of Ilaló-Lumbisí. Both spring as a common, collective and pro-active resistance to such situation and aim to provide the communes involved with political power and territorial presence: that what formerly appeared as a unidimensional point to the eyes of the dominant powers, a commune has now the potential to turn into an Aleph for its inhabitants, acquiring a living thickness along a certain dimension that traditional systems of representation are unable to recognize: passive limitlessness can become pro-active infiniteness. Through several visits to the communes and various online and in-person meetings with Kitu Kara leaders, our ongoing project works in direct collaboration with them

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and with the creation and ulterior thriving of the Federation of Communes as an objective, helping to envision those forms of political construction capable of activating and fostering the above mentioned shift.

Our first aim, therefore, becomes creating those planning instruments able to reimagine a notion of limit that, while having the real capacity to interfere and negotiate with State ownership regimes, is able to challenge the classical forms of representation defining them. Building upon previous research on communal delimitations and military geographic information, these tools will contribute not only in the geo-reference and ulterior official recognition of communal boundaries, but also in the recovery of the practices and memories that produce them: to that aim, we have developed an online platform which, besides allowing comuneros to work and debate over the different footprints of the communes, includes a register of land use and ownership and a communal census to identify the different collaborative activities within their territories, favoring the consolidation of an economic structure based on their own resources and knowledges. This, we envision, will lead to the eventual creation of an always evolving internal counter-cadaster for territorial planning and communal zoning that will ultimately contribute to defining production purposes of land, enhancing environmental protection and constructing historical memory.

Beyond a quantitative biophysical and socioeconomic study of their communal territories, we aim above all to the generation of qualitative self-governance tools needed to translate a lifeless system of Cartesian representation into one that, rather than categorizing and “locking” into shape, is capable of harboring and fostering the repertoire of the multiple ancestral and contemporary formsof-life and practices being deployed in the communes. We consider it is specially from these invisible and marginalized spaces that urban space can be re-territorialized and reclaimed in an autonomous and emancipatory way. In our project, therefore, the preservation and recovery of an indigenous past goes hand in hand with the revalorization of a marginalized rural-urban present in a conjoined effort to reimagine and re-signify a collective future for the city of Quito.

It is especially from these invisible and marginalized spaces that urban space can be re-territorialized and reclaimed in an autonomous and emancipatory way.

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03.

(Re)Production of Urban Knowledge Labor and education in Quito and New York City by Masoom Moitra

This paper aims to find shared spaces between the struggles of migrant women who work as informal laborers in Mercado San Roque in Quito, Ecuador, and the struggles of a bilingual school for children that is situated adjacent to it.

Mercado San Roque is a traditional food market that accounts for more than 30% of Quito’s food supply, and is currently faced with the threat of displacement. It accounts for the livelihoods of many women who move here from the country, along with their families in search of work as carriers, peelers, vendors, candy sellers and cleaners ; the school provides an important link to their labor in that it allows them to combine the working day with the care and education of their children. The school was formed by labor organizers from the market through the occupation of an abandoned building, in response to the lack of support structures for the children of new migrant workers.

In an attempt to strengthen this relationship, this project proposes the cultivation of a network of autonomous, after-school programs- ‘Escuelas de Esperanza/ Schools of Hope’- involving worker mothers and children of the market. These programs are designed to act as alternative think-tanks that extend indigenous systems of knowledge and organization for urban, community based research and action based planning. To achieve this, the project establishes a flow of cultural exchanges between the Ecuadorian immigrant community in New York (through Immigrant Movement International), who face similar challenges of labor and education, and the school in Quito.

The objective is to create conditions for the generation of self-emergent spaces for the production of new forms of political, urban knowledge, along with supporting the reproductive labor of migrant, worker mothers.

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...production of new forms of political, urban knowledge, along with supporting the reproductive labor of migrant, worker mothers.

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(Top) “Turistas Fotografían a Artistas Callejeros,” (“Tourists Photograph Street Artists”), (Top) ​“Turistas Fotografían a Artistas Callejeros,” (“Tourists Photograph Street Artists”), Calle Sucre, Centro Histórico de Quito Calle Sucre, Centro Histórico de Quito (Bottom) “No Quieren Reubicacíon,” (“They Do Not Want Relocation”), Documentary still, Mercado San Roque: una casa para todos , Fundación de Museos de la Ciudad, Quito (Bottom)​ “No Quieren Reubicacíon,” (“They Do Not Want Relocation”), Documentary still, Mercado San Roque: una casa para todos,​ Fundación de Museos de la Ciudad, Quito

04.

Allied with the Antimaravilla: Arts-based Community Practices and Resistance to Authorized Heritage Discourse in Quito, Ecuador by Sinead Petrasek

This study is about the material conditions that make the historic center of Quito a valuable economic asset, and the social impact of these conditions. Particularly, it is about the relationship between the historic center and Mercado San Roque, a large traditional food market located within the center which is known conventionally as the antimaravilla, or “antiwonder.” I examine the recent efforts of several arts-based practitioners to validate the market as a culturally significant site, drawing on critical urban and aesthetic theory. Legitimizing the market as a counter site allows the discordant nature of heritage and preservation to be actively negotiated within the city, undermining the dominance of authorized heritage discourse and recent initiatives that seek to subsume nonconforming sites.

versus exclusion, in favour of validating counter sites to emphasize that conflict is an integral aspect of heritage discourse.

This study has significance as 1) a model for how artistic practices can ally with particular urban political struggles, foregrounding the politics in advance of the art practice’s form or aesthetic in a way that meets the needs of the community, and 2), as a strategy for disrupting the dominance of authorized heritage discourse institutionalized by global agencies, not by intervening in the heritage site and therefore drawing more attention to it, but by focusing on counter sites. In an era when cities are traded as commodities and rated along lines of creative value and potential, the case of Quito demonstrates a point of disruption in the global market.

I focus on the contemporary period following the 1978 designation of Quito as a UNESCO World Heritage site, tracing the increased preservation efforts in the center alongside the shifts in Quito’s arts and culture scene in the late twentieth century. Examining these co-constitutive processes reveals a convergence between urban social struggles and communityfocused artistic practice. This convergence, I suggest, explains the recent attention to the San Roque market based on shared socio-political circumstances. I focus on various related approaches to community practice that come from the arts: mediación comunitaria, which works to link institutions and communities, collective approaches such as arte urbano, and activist-led work. I position these approaches in relation to the expanded field of participatory and site-based contemporary art internationally, drawing on the discourse of socially-engaged art and theories of revolutionary artistic practice.

I consider how practitioners must negotiate their role and the potential for the communitybased approach to visibilize the market in such a way that increases its vulnerability. However, through embracing conflict, I suggest that this case provides a model for alliances between artistic practice and urban social struggles by foregrounding political strategies rather than focusing on form or aesthetic. With regards to urban heritage discourse, this study proposes to shift away from the dilemma of integration

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...conflict is an integral aspect of heritage discourse.

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05.

Grounded Coerciveness of Tourism & Nation Branding: Slow Violence Towards Large Traditional Food Markets in Quito, Ecuador by Alexandra (Zanny) Venner

This thesis contributes to an existing dialect between built urban form and living urban space when new tourism, branding, and development strategies explicitly make the formation of the future city that spatially excludes and governmentally prioritizes. One point of departure to understand and contribute to this dialect falls under an analysis of the making of a world-class tourist destination. The astounding forces that contribute to the city and nation becoming a “destination”, are related

to the conditions of inter-urban competition; a process where governmental authorities work to sell their local and nation-wide assets to the global stage for international attraction, which includes tourism and foreign investment. This conceptualization of urban life is essential to frame because it offers clues as to which sectors become prioritized for (re)development and which sectors, urban forms and populations remain in the background and experience exclusion, disinvestment, and or displacement.

Thus, to see such contested macro and micro processes at play, a collective, year-long thesis project based in Quito, Ecuador, enabled a particular investigation to link how top-down inter-urban competitive strategies-based on tourism and (re)branding-produces an exclusionary city where low-income populations and marginalized districts are negatively impacted. One particular site to understand the macro, competitive, political and economic logic that works to actively undermine authentic sites of social activity and cultural and economic exchange, is through the dynamic sites of Quito’s large traditional food markets.

Out of Quito’s 52 large traditional food markets, Mercado San Roque is one particular market that is more impacted by current National and Municipal plans and vision selling the capital city of Quito and the nation of Ecuador to the global stage. This market is threatened with displacement and perceived as a site of crime and disorder by the general public. Its general negative reputation in the city is mainly due to the surrounding neighbourhood of a class that is of lower-economic status, indigenous people, sex-workers, and also included an active prison until 2014. This stands in stark contrast to its neighbouring district, Quito’s UNESCO Historical Centre District, which receives significant investment attention from local and international political actors working to sustain its colonial heritage and status as a world-class destination site.

Further, ongoing pressures of luxury development in the form of a 5 star hotel envisioned for the neighbourhood of San Roque and city plans to modernize the market via a

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strong gentrifying vision is one telling sign of the city’s larger economic plans for increasing income from tourism, which involves sanitizing “informal” sectors of the city. For instance, the Municipality’s long term Land Management Strategy to invest in “attraction zones” in the form of profitable commercial, business and tourist sectors can be argued as a tool that promotes long-term, uneven, and marketoriented urban development and redevelopment that puts emphasis on the speculation for the prosperity of Quito’s future. This is one tactic that devalues other significant city spaces that do not possess profitable value(s) and who have limited recognition or validity in the City’s urban agenda; thereby triggering processes of devalorization, displacement and/or commodification.

Fundamentally, the grounded coerciveness of tourism and (re)branding has extraordinary impacts on the future of Quito’s landscape. Thus, through active field work, a synthesis of on-theground knowledge, and an ongoing collaboration with an activist-based organization in Quito called, Red de Sabres, I have identified a design proposition to contribute to the market’s existing struggle. I am proposing a narrative-based design tool, called “The Future of Two Markets”, to enable Red de Sabres to engage the markets about exclusionary economic development plans via tourism and branding and their own spatial reality.

Through the locus of Mercado San Roque as the heart of the story, “The Future of Two Markets” is an accessible, entertaining and politicizing narrative to catalyze a more controversial conversation about the macro and micro forces piercing everyday life. The underlying value of this narrative piece is to build awareness and capacities for the organizational structures of and related to the markets to understand the unforeseeable consequences shaping their future city and, ultimately, their future market(s). After all, in order to advance into any policy recommendations there needs to be a heightened awareness about exclusionary forms of economic development and there is a need to begin this discussion at the macro level.

...there is a need to bring a heightened awareness about exclusionary forms of economic development...

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BIOS Gamar Markarian

Tait Mandler

received her BS in Landscape Design and Ecosystem Management in 2005. She has taught and worked at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon and EARTH University, Costa Rica. In 2008, Gamar co-founded Atelier Hamra; a landscape architecture office in Beirut, Lebanon. Currently, Gamar is continuing the participatory media project in Quito, Ecuador that began as her collaborative master’s thesis at The New School. She is also a research associate at the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons, New York.

uses design to integrate academic work and activism. They have an MS in Design and Urban Ecologies from Parsons and a BA in Environmental Studies from the New College of Florida. In addition to continuing their thesis work in Ecuador, Tait works with the Chemical Youth Project at the University of Amsterdam doing research on queer nightlife, chemical use, and the labor of pleasure.

Mateo Fernández -Muro

Masoom Moitra

Sinead Petrasek

is an architect, urban-activist, artist, researcher, dissenter, designer and student organizer from Mumbai. She works on urban issues that involve participation in collaborative and creative struggles for claiming the right to the city for those who are overlooked by the state and its allies.

completed her BA in the Honours Art History program at McGill University in Montréal. She has worked for the Girls Action Foundation, volunteered with Social Planning Toronto, and has extensive training in post-secondary student support. She is currently a Graduate Fellow with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and also served as a Fellow with the Curatorial Design Research Lab. Sinead plans to continue engaging in praxis-oriented academic and curatorial work.

is an architect in 2011 from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and received his Master’s in Advanced Architectural Projects (MPAA) in 2013 from ETSAM, where he is now a PhD candidate researching on the political relation between spatial fictions and conflict in the postdemocratic city. He is co-founder of Displacements Journal and collaborates with Cultural Landscape Research Group at ETSAM.

María Guadalupe Morales is a Mexican architect that has worked in the design of vertical housing and in the diffusion of sustainable practices for large scale projects in Mexico City, some of which she has been invited to publish and lecture on. She is trying to accomplish better social and environmental strategies in a more complex and urban scale through the Design and Urban Ecologies Program.

Alexandra (Zanny) Venner is motivated by big mountains, people, and the processes of city-making.

As a young woman balancing a rich city life with never-ending mountain invitations, Zanny is learning to find a way to let adventure, education and work coalesce and resonate into a single way of seeing and acting in the world. The life she lives, as an elite athlete, urban practitioner, and backcountry traveler, is her launching point.

Sascia Bailer studied Communication and Cultural Management (BA) at Zeppelin University in Germany. She has created and participated in many different social and cultural initiatives, film festivals and exhibition projects around the globe, always interested in the the socio-political power of the arts.

From 2014 to Fall 2015, she worked as the Graduate Fellow for Art and Social Justice of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. She is currently investigating artistic strategies in regards to their socio-political potential to transform the urban.

The research and design processes were particularly different for this cohort of students since their theses were developed in a semester rather than in the usual one year period.

The first half of the graduation year students explored different urban landscapes in a design studio, where they worked with local groups in the Rockways, Queens, and activists and favelados in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This experience inspired and prepared them to shape the following one-semester graduation projects, which by the way are mind-blowing considering the time frame.

section 3 Design and Urban Ecologies MSC Advocating for City and Civil Rights through Design by Gabriela Rendón

The following thesis projects depict the diverse scopes, approaches and scales of urban interventions pursued at the Design and Urban Ecologies (MS) program. Undoubtedly, despite the different localities and actors involved in each of these studies, all the projects converge by calling for new tools of urban pedagogy, hyperlocal and trans-national coalitions for knowledge exchange, and participatory strategies to produce just public spaces, neighborhoods, and cities, regardless their formality or informality.

During this journey students acknowledged that the proposed projects —which fiercely advocate for housing, land, city and civil rights― can only be attained with the active involvement of a wide range of collaborators including public officials, community experts, local leaders, academics, activists, and citizens. Therefore, we would like to thank all of those that contributed to the development of these projects.

Users sense of inclusion in increasingly privatized public spaces is examined by Denilyn Arciaga. Her project engages with underrepresented users, specifically chess players, in the emblematic and lively Union Square Park in NYC. With the objective to counteract the asymmetrical and often hidden power dynamics present in this emblematic public space, her project envisions a users ‘diagram’ allowing underrepresented groups to be part of the mapping/design process.

Urban pedagogies as a practice towards the Right to the City are tested by Mariana Bomtempo in Brasilia. She identifies “urban illiteracy” as an obstacle for citizens participation in the transformation of their own living environment.

Since for the very first time the share of native born citizens is larger than the share of migrants in this city, she engages the young residents in a participatory action research to produce new urban knowledge and coproduce the future of Brasilia. Mariana’s project empowers the youth to became committed and active citizens by using creative and innovative tools as part of a year-long after-school pilot project.

The Right to the City is also inquired within Brazilian law and favela territories by Alexa Jensen. Her project explores the dialectical relationships between the policy perspectives of the federal government, the municipality and the favelados to the resettlement of favela residents and subsequent gentrification of their neighborhoods. She exposes ways in which existing urban policy may be translated in order to entitle favela residents to critique the current conditions and make informed decisions about their land tenure and land rights. Her project offers a land rights tool with three components— education, legalization and collectivization― to favelados to turn the Right to the City policy into praxis.

Land and housing struggles in the context of spectacular development are scrutinized by Drew Vanderburg in Rio de Janeiro and NYC. His provocative project unearths recent narratives of locally embedded social movements and

evaluates their efforts to resist mega-event driven urban development. The discoveries aim expanding activist repertories, both hyperlocally and trans-nationally, while urging the creation of mega-event resistance campaigns.

For this end, Drew devices Extrastagecraft and the Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives, a potential pathway for a more ethical and sustainable Olympic Movement.

Shibani Jadhav delves into involuntary resettlement processes of slum dwellers in Mumbai, which often result in geographical and psychological segregation. After extensive fieldwork and collaboration with local organizations and resettlement dwellers, she critically engages in resettlement processes by providing scenarios to alleviate socio-economic and spatial segregation. Considering the limitations and aspiring to humanize existing relocation and adaptation processes her project proposes three different interventions: a deep mapping, a listening archive and a youth program.

The urban is finally explored by traveling to the Antrophocene. Darcy Bender examines approaches of understanding this epoch and methodologies to discern how the study of urban systems, which is often confined to cities, can be explored beyond urbanization processes by acknowledging their impact at the planetary scale. She proposes the practice of traveling to landscapes of human intervention that are usually considered ‘expired’ and ‘forgotten’, but yet are cared by locals, to uncover situated entanglements and new modes of interpreting and modifying human-material relations in our everyday lives.

Thesis and external advisors: Victoria Marshall, Assistant Professor of Urban Design; Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Associate Professor of Urbanism; Jilly Traganou, Associate Professor of Spatial Design; Robert Kirkbride, Associate Professor of Architecture and Product Design; Eric Brelsford, Adjunct Professor Urban Ecologies; Rob Robinson, National Economic and Social Rights Initiative; Edesio Fernandes, Associate Professor of Urban Policy NYU; Gerônimo Leitão Director of Architecture and Urbanism at UFF; Emie Eshmawy, Department of Housing and Urban Development; Teresa Williamson, Catalytic Communities; Sheela Patel, SPARK; and John Hill, chess strategist at Union Square Park.

01.

EN PASSANT: Strategic Moves to Counterattack Displacement. by Denilyn Arciaga En Passant. | (ä:Npa:sä:N) | adverb. In passing; by the way; incidentally.

In chess, En Passant is a rare pawn capture. If it is not executed, under strict conditions, the opportunity is lost. In the fifteenth century, pawns were granted the ability to move two squares forward on their first move.

Afterwards, the En Passant rule was developed to prevent pawns from having too much power or freedom. The pawn is the most numerous piece, historically represented as a peasant or soldier, it is also widely perceived as the weakest.

In this thesis, EN PASSANT is a tool inspired by and developed with those of which this project engages: chess players in Union Square Park. Their place of recreation is a site infused with infinite histories, defining it as one of the most important American urban public spaces. In the last few decades, the privatization of public spaces has increased through the formation of public-private partnerships.

Their exclusionary, non-democratic processes have greatly diminished the publicness of open space. However, after unflattening the historical narrative of Union Square Park through four contending storylines and resynthesizing through a critical lens, I question if this space was ever “public” to begin with.

What is “public” in urban public spaces? What kind of democracy is needed to achieve a truly inclusive public space? And how might EN PASSANT challenge the top-down, nondemocratic processes through a grounded, participatory design approach that empowers underrepresented, yet active users of Union Square Park?

PASSANT is the exchange of academic knowledge translated in a language that socially-constructs the chess players. Chess is a fitting metaphor for the power dynamics of space. The board becomes diagrammatic of the imbalance or uneven outcomes with an emphasis of the two opposing forces of space: those who use it and those who control it. The intention is that this booklet becomes a tool to collectively craft a larger diagrammatic map of users who contribute to the socio-cultural diversity of Union Square Park, but are often left out of the decision-making processes.

Although there are limitations to researching and designing with a specific group of users, it has also open up insights and discoveries that may have been overlooked. One of the biggest challenges of this thesis is not the complexity of actors in public-private partnerships or the endless conflictual theories that explain or hypothesize certain situated scenarios found along the process. Rather, it is uncovering the spatial codes of conduct through online preliminary research. Reading that “they most certainly don’t take any bullshit” is intimidating as a non-black yet non-white female approaching a mostly colored, male-dominated space. As an urbanist challenging the traditional forms of urban practice, these moments of breaking established boundaries become a practice in and of itself in order to break existing profit-seeking norms, thus radically altering our conceived urban environments.

The development of the research is heavily dependent on the ethnographic fieldwork including participant observation, semistructured interviews with chess players and long-term residents, photo-documentation of the economic landscape, and conducting on-site surveys with (non-chess) users of the park.

Based on the analysis of findings, I explore one way of how non-democratic processes have not been challenged: the overwhelming perceptions that public space is “someone else’s property”.

Therefore, EN PASSANT is a design opportunity to reframe popular understanding about Union Square Park. One of the key features of EN

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...challenging the traditional forms of urban practice, these moments of breaking established boundaries...

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02.

Anthropocene Tours: Sensing the field, reforming relations by Darcy Bender

Geologists are debating the existence of a new geologic epoch, one where humans are the primary force of impact on the planet. Warming climate, ocean acidification, ubiquitous plastic pollutants, and nuclear fallout have contributed to a “pervasive and persistent signature” on the surface of the Earth. With the naming of the Anthropocene, the outcomes of human life on earth are connected in complex webs with nonhuman life in new ways that are both terrifying in their uncertainty and hopeful in the openness of new possibilities. This thesis aims to provide a new understanding of the material environment in the Anthropocene epoch. It argues that The Anthropocene offers the opportunity to make radical changes - it has the power to shift whole systems of human-material relations.

This thesis engages a method of regional travel and guided tours as a means of seeing, understanding and communicating the Anthropocene. Through a survey of contemporary writings on the Anthropocene and an analysis of critical tourism methodologies, I will outline the framework and ethics for conversation, representation, and movement that are integral to the practice of tourism in this context. By visiting landscapes of human intervention that are generally considered byproducts, discarded or forgotten, travelers uncover the complex web of connections that form landscapes under our current social and economic systems. They then brainstorm new logics, methods and social relationships that will care for and create enduring value for these sites through diverse citizen participation. The trips partner with local community based organizations and nonprofits and host workshops to understand the interconnectedness of humans, materials, and technology. By understanding non-human scales, witnessing landscapes-in-the-making and making connections while acknowledging difference, participants find ways to sense, quantify and represent the Anthropocene while simultaneously brainstorming ways to transform the social systems in which we function to create qualitatively better modes of interacting.

conversations that question the extractive logics that produced these landscapes and reflected on the social, political and cultural meanings that are entangled in our physical world. Learning from this experience, the outcome of this thesis is a guide for others to make their own similar journey, and an online platform to discover similar sites across the globe and share artwork, mappings and writing about and inspired by the travel experiences.

The fields of study concerning urban systems often focus their analyses on the city or metropolitan area as a discrete entity with firm boundaries. However, in the Anthropocene, it is clear that human influence is not confined to spaces of human habitation - the process of urbanization has reached planetary scale.

Cities are connected to distant spaces through transportation infrastructure, pollution, supply chains, communication, and tourism - all of which present an opportunity to perceive new definitions of cities and what it means to live an urban lifestyle. While this project does not focus on “the city” in the traditional sense, it engages with processes of urbanization by traveling through space and time to bear witness to what Neil Brenner calls “operational landscapes” in order to explore new modes of interpreting human-material interactions in the Anthropocene.

This project aims to redefine how travel can impact social relations between urban and nonurban, human and non-human spaces. Travelers will come away with a deepened sense of their entangled yet situated surroundings and how their everyday lives are impacted by operational landscapes. Guides are given the time and space to tell their stories on their terms and are able to see their own context with a renewed perspective. Everyone involved will uncover situated entanglements which set the stage for new modes of understanding their lives as citizens in the Anthropocene.

For the inaugural trip, a group of artists, designers and activists spent a weekend touring ‘expired’ sites in Pennsylvania. We challenged the pervasive and persistent signature of the epoch as wholly negative and imagine how it might be different. Travelers created photographs, drawings, writings and critical

“

...to redefine how travel can impact social relations between urban and nonurban, human and non-human spaces.

”

03.

Urban Pedagogies as a Practice of the Right to the City in Brasilia.

Understanding the past and present to change the future. by Mariana Bomtempo

Built from ‘scratch’, Brasilia was constructed to be the capital of Brazil in the end of the 1950s by a labor force that could not afford and was not allowed to live there. Nowadays as the fourth biggest population in the country, Brasilia faces a dramatic social-spatial segregation due to urban policies that were applied to keep it sectored, placing low-income neighborhoods far from the wealthy ones and from most of the formal work positions. To challenge and change this recurrent scenario of Brazilian cities, it is necessary not only to develop policies and apply them, but also to plan processes and public instruments that foster civic participation and consider citizens’ priorities. However, ‘participation’ has been dangerously misused when the population is called to give their opinion on topics that are not clearly explained and the outcomes tend not to actually represent the need of these communities. This creates an obstacle: without knowledge of urban processes, public instruments and effective ways to achieve their visions, urban citizens feel powerless and are unable to put into practice their ‘right to the city’ (Harvey, 2012). Recently, Erminia Maricato named this phenomenon ‘urban illiteracy’, that must be targeted to promote more democratic cities.

In this project, I would like to contextualize this ‘urban illiteracy’ in the scenario of Brasilia, where, for the first time in the history of such a young city, the percentage of native born residents is bigger than the migrant ones, and the sense of belonging is emerging in this generation who is trying to find a space to create their urban identity. It is a great moment to inspire the youth to take over Brasilia, to assist them to discover their role as citizens of Brasilia and create the tools that can support them to envision the future of the city. In order to achieve this, I am proposing and prototyping in collaboration with one local partner an after school pilot project for high school students in Taguatinga, Brasilia.

is understanding the city as a space where complex systems operate, people intermingle and the students are also effective participants in this environment. The group of students will investigate how their city works and communicate this knowledge with other citizens. In the second phase, students and facilitators will collectively map the local economy, acknowledging the potential opportunities to produce locally and relate the narrative of these businesses with the local community. Finally, they will use the knowledge gathered about processes and production in the neighborhood to propose and prototype ideas that can bring changes towards a desirable future for their community. Afterwards, the outcomes of the three phases of the program will be exposed and shared to create public awareness about the students’ findings and the power of the youth transforming the city.

The program envisions to take the recurrent cynicism of youngsters to foster critical thinking about and engagement in changing their environment into a desirable one. This is a great opportunity for the students to think about their power to change their city, creating a momentum that is different from the narrative of the city that has been neglecting the existence of the majority of the population. There is a huge power in the awareness that everybody has the right to the city in order to pursue democratic participation and to promote change.

The combination of scientific and popular knowledge provided by this pilot project can bring innovative and transformative projects into the city, changing the recurrent status quo of lack of citizen participation in urban processes in Brasilia. The power and the results of these new insights are timeless and can be spread among different groups of people and generations of brasilienses to keep the energy rolling towards transforming the prevailed struggles and producing less unjust cities.

The program aims to investigate how the school, as the converging center in the neighborhood, can search for alternatives for the well being of the community. The students will be encouraged to explore, discuss and understand their neighborhood inside the city, and to develop strategies to communicate their findings and to empower the local community, employing creativity, art and design. Basically, the program has three phases. The core of the first phase

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...for the first time in the history of such a young city, the percentage of native born residents is bigger than the migrant ones...

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04.

Shaping [Re]settlement Ecologies: From repressive and neglected to inclusive and dignified citizenship in Mumbai. by Shibani Jadhav

Human settlements have historically evolved to cope with the needs, desires and aspirations of human beings. At the same time, these settlements continue to influence the physical, social and psychological well being of human beings who dwell and interact with them.

In times where the predominant human settlement, the cities, are rebranding to shape their global image, the selective linking of desirable landscapes, through visible and invisible infrastructures, is plowing the existing fabric of the cities, only to displace, distance and disconnect existing communities. This involuntary displacement of communities in Mumbai, has lead to the process of [re] settlement in far off locations, which has resulted in geographical and psychological segregation of already marginalized communities. These concentrated [re]settlement initiatives are shaped through a violent process of dispossession and continual rupture of communities. Hence, how can the process of [re]settlement be shaped in order to alleviate socio-economic, spatial and environmental segregation of marginalised communities?

To productively disrupt the nuances of the process, there are two distinct paths that can be explored within the dimensions of [re] settlement. One which radically resist the process of displacement and resettlement in far off locations, by realising alternatives to rehabilitate the communities within their existing contexts. While, the second path is to recognize the ongoing process of [re]settlement, along with its complexities, in order to shape it in a way that benefits both, the governing agencies and the communities at threat. Path two, not only opens up the possibilities to engage with past, present and future initiatives, but at the same time provides an opportunity to question its relevance in future. Given the scale and urgency at which [re]settlement initiatives are being employed, this thesis acknowledges the process by collaborating with local organizations such as The Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers [ SPARC, India ], The National Slum Dwellers Federation [ NSDF ] and Mahila Milan, “(a) decentralized network of poor women’s collective” in Mumbai. My practice, thereby aims to critically engage with this urban process to situate a scenario that alleviate socio-economic and spatial segregation of marginalised communities, rather than one that enforces an ecology of repression and neglect.

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In a sincere attempt to humanize the existing mechanisms, my practice indulges in three different interventions: the Deep Mapping, the Listening Archive and the Youth Program. In order to holistically address the convoluted process of [re]settlement, the multidimensional interventions are built on both, the understanding of what it means to be resettled and the factors governing the socio-economic, cultural and environmental conditions of the human settlements. The aim of Deep Mapping is to visualize the macro factors of the [re]settlement initiatives, that influence the ecologies of the given locations.

This online, interactive map will serve as a tool for governing agencies, local organisations, activists and the beneficiaries to set criterias and to make informed decisions for the selection of locations for [re]settlement. The Listening Archive is a diagrammatic compilation of observations, experiences and reflections of the inhabitants of the existing [re]settlement initiatives, which were documented through extensive conversations and interactions over a period of two months in 2015. On realising the depth and relevance of the research, SPARC intends to use it as a tool, not only to negotiate with the governing agencies for desirable built environment in future [re]settlement initiatives, but also to engage with the existing initiatives to create meaningful spaces. The sudden transition from horizontal to vertical settlements, along with added responsibilities and concerns is an astonishing leap of faith, a rupture that needs care and time to heal.

Designed to assist the beneficiaries in the initial phase of transition, the temporary [6 to 8 months] post [re]settlement Youth Program has a threefold objective: i. Provide guidance to cope with changes in everyday activities within the settlements. ii. Instigate interaction and collaboration among the younger generation. iii. Provide a framework for horizontal transfer of knowledge across generations.

The ways in which we, as humans, perceive our own existence and relations is shaping the ever changing environment we dwell in. By shifting the focus from repressive and neglected ecologies to inclusive and dignified ecologies, my practice actively engages with the everyday life of the everyday people.

...to engage with the existing initiatives to create meaningful spaces.

”

05.

The Right to the City Rethinking the Democratic Paradox in Rio de Janeiro through Organizational Tools for Land Rights by Alexa Jensen

Current Brazilian urban policy has laid the groundwork for favela residents to begin to claim their right to the city; while many Brazilian municipalities have initiated an activation of federal urban policy by planning better cities both with and for their residents, the Rio de Janeiro municipality has instead averted and manipulated many of these policies in their preparation for past and upcoming mega events.

The momentum of these global events have advanced the city into a state of exception that has served as a catalyst for an amalgamation of stakeholders and public-private partnerships to begin to privatize public resources in order to prime the city of Rio for the global stage. The operative framing of Rio as a global city has allowed pervasive narratives of “formality” versus “informality” to permeate and shape mega event planning practice and has thus sanctioned the evasion of federal urban policy by the Rio de Janeiro Municipality - where this evasion of urban policy within planning practice has effectively conceded to the displacement of over 77,000 residents between the years of 2009 and 2015.

This thesis seeks to explore the dialectical relationships between the multiple policy perspectives of the federal government, the municipality and the favelados to the resettlement of favela residents and subsequent gentrification of their neighborhoods in a current state of exception. The objectives of this research will be to consider the significance and centrality of the favela within Rio de Janeiro’s city logic by considering its “informality”, instead, as a productive form of practice; to achieve an advanced understanding of current Brazilian Federal Urban Policies involving The Right to the City, The Right to Adequate Housing and Land Regularization; to identify how these policies are translated within the favela pre and post states of exception; and finally, to understand what The Right to the City means within the favela and how its meaning may be augmented to compliment each unique favela agglomeration.

In this examination I employ methods of design-thinking in order to productively disrupt the problematic narratives of informality by translating and adapting federal urban policy to aid in the political agency of favelados. The task of design within this project will be to both “encourage and support the discourse and practice of the social production of places

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of “cooperation” by organizing conditions of co-existence and coproduction, and by enabling “action in conjunction.” I do this by uncovering the ways in which existing urban policy may be translated spatially and visually in order to empower favela residents to effectively critique the current conditions produced by a municipallevel liberalization of federal urban policy.

Specifically, I work to expose the ways in which favela residents may be able to make more informed decisions about their land tenure, land rights, and claiming a right to the city both within and outside of states of exception through the creation of a land rights instrument.

The land rights instrument is a tool which features three distinct components that combine to create a comprehensive body of knowledge and resources for favela residents: Education, Legalization, and Collectivization. Along with its components, this tool strives to touch upon three distinct features that will measure its success over time. The first is that of embeddedness, this proposal must be pertinent to and useful for each community that it comes in contact with. For the tool to begin to be embedded, I have synthesized information from previous site visits by learning from the opinions of the local residents, by observing popular communication tools and by understanding how best to communicate existing policy and land rights ideas to favelados. This tool must also be embedded in the site, itself as it must be handed over to actors within the specified territories as an instrument for use. The second feature of the tool is reflexiveness; this instrument must be able to be given to actors within the community that will adapt and change it over time so that it will continue to be relevant for residents seeking knowledge on land rights. The third feature is that of hysteresis; where this instrument is understood as a time-based system that generates durational community resilience.

Therefore, it must be understood that this tool creates trans-generational social resilience by enabling communities to begin to imagine alternative forms of cohabitation that may be able to protect them from future displacement and shock both within and outside of states of exception.

...this tool creates trans-generational social resilience by enabling communities to begin to imagine alternative forms of cohabitation...

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06.

Olympic ExtraStagecraft: Spectacular Development and Dissent in Rio de Janeiro and New York City by Drew Vanderburg

The CENTRAL RESEARCH QUESTION of this thesis project is: What strategies and tactics are most effective to attain measurable outcomes in resistance to mega-event driven urban development?

This project is RELEVANT TO THE MODERN HUMAN CONDITION because it presents recent narratives of locally embedded social movements and evaluates their efforts to resist mega-event driven urban development.

The research is useful in the quest to design ever more effective methods of resistance and reform. The discoveries herein pertain to expanding activist repertoires in the digital age, both hyper-locally and trans-nationally. My hope is that this research can be adapted and applied to future mega-event resistance campaigns.

The paper progresses over 5 chapters: 1 Characterizing the Olympic Oligarchy – Chapter 1 identifies the structure and membership of the International Olympic Committee, describes its complicity with media, real-estate and construction, and charts the process by which the Olympics promise to generate wealth for a host city but end up extracting wealth from the city.

2 Parallel Scenarios in RIO + NYC – Between the 2014 World Cup and the impending 2016 Olympics, the people of Rio de Janeiro have experienced police violence, forced evictions, and rising rents. New York City has experienced the same hardships in the wake of vast rezoning and construction, precipitated from a bid to host the 2012 Olympic games. Zooming in to the specific geographic sites and communities, this chapter traces symmetries and linkages between the plights of Rio and New York.

THE OLYMPICS are one of the world’s most powerful design-actors. With 205 member nations plus a newly formed international refugee team, the International Olympic Committee is technically the most representative governing body on Earth. Yet while the Olympic vision promotes “peace,” “dignity,” and “harmonious development,” the Olympic games are constantly marked by violence, displacement, and repression of dissent. How can we realign Olympism’s actions with its values? How can our civilization design a new Olympic movement that is ethical and sustainable?

3 Theorizing Extrastagecraft – Out of the situationist discourse against spectacle rises the usefulness of counter-spectacle in resistance movements. The democratization of the camera and the liquification of the stage have opened new avenues for claiming space and performing dissent. Based on Keller Easterling’s alternative activist repertoire Extrastatecraft, I devise Extrastagecraft, a new form of counterspectacular activism to co-opt Olympic visuality on a multitude of extra stages.

4 A Taxonomy of Resistance Techniques –This chapter describes 18 resistance organizations

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in both Rio de Janeiro and New York City who are relevant to the 2016 Olympics or the 2012 Olympic bid. An analysis of the goals, techniques, and outcomes of each reveals that these resistance movements fail to slow the advance of the corporate forces that drive megaevent development. There is a need to REDESIGN RESISTANCE. I aggregate the most effective strategies and tactics from the sample, which become the basis for the proposals in the final chapter.

5 The Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives – I propose the Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives, a trans-national organization whose mission is to design a more ethical and sustainable Olympic movement. It is a hybrid watchdog news agency, resistance support network, and urban ecologies clearing house. In addition to bringing environmental impact reviews and lawsuits against the International Olympic Committee, The Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives will foster a plural and participatory process of Olympic design. This chapter concludes with three examples of potential design alternatives that use Olympic Extrastagecraft.

My contribution to the field of urbanism is threefold. First, I have INVENTED THE THEORY of Extrastagecraft which funnels Keller Easterling’s Extrastatecraft activism techniques through the lenses of spectacle theory and theater theory. Second, I have actually embodied Extrastagecraft throughout the semester, (in the form of art exhibits, musical performances, internet memes, costume design, etc.), DEMONSTRATING THE NEED for a more aesthetic and performative engagement with the built environment in both activism and academia. Third, by proposing the Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives, I have LAID THE GROUNDWORK for a potential pathway towards redesigning the Olympic Movement, but more importantly I have suggested thinking big and dreaming bigger if one expects to get anything accomplished.

Resisting and reforming the Olympic project may be ambitious but that is precisely the point.

No social progress can be made without fresh leaps of the imagination. Resistance requires LEADERSHIP, ENTHUSIASM, and THE BELIEF IN THE POSSIBILITY to affect even the most entrenched systems of power on our planet.

What strategies and tactics are most effective to attain measurable outcomes in resistance to mega-event driven urban development?

”

BIOS Denilyn Arciaga

Darcy Bender

Mariana Bomtempo

is an architect and urbanist. With roots in Chicago, Denilyn’s fascination with the urban has led her to work, volunteer, and explore 15 countries spanning 3 continents. Following a non-traditional path re-routed her to become part of the DUE program. The complexity of challenging projects developed her critical theory skills and design-driven research approach through a community-engaging process. What she loves most about it: working with culturally diverse people from different fields gives her the ability to learn more about the global.

is a designer, mapmaker, fabricator, and travel guide with an interest in how the discards of our everyday lives shape the entangled yet situated social, political, cultural, material world around us. Prior to studying trash, Darcy created waste in the fields of affordable housing construction, retail display, museum education and at a DIY maker space. She hopes to continue designing, mapmaking, fabricating and traveling while always leaving time to stop and smell the garbage.

is an enthusiastic driven by passion.

She is an architect, designer and urbanist extremely interested on topics related to the right to the city. She believes that cities are rich environments to people exchange ideas and get together to fight for the commons. She believes that the biggest power to achieve equitable societies relies on thinking outside the box to create awareness towards alternative futures.

Shibani Jadhav

Alexa Jensen

Drew Vanderburg

is a designer, researcher and an urban practitioner from India. Her practice engages with urban processes that shapes the ecologies of everyday lives, to create scenario that uphold inclusion within lived environments. Shibani enjoys travelling, web mapping and running.

is a passionate urbanist, architect, designer, and life traveller. Her current work focuses on urban displacement and land rights in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas and explores the role of design in processes of change-making within Rio de Janeiro’s current condition. She hopes to continue to study the complex inner workings of the urban as well as to design alternative ways of thinking about inclusion, cohabitation and co creation in the context of the city’s landscape.

is an artist, street performer and urbanist. After a decade designing, directing, and performing in New York City’s downtown theater scene, Drew sought to apply his humanistic design sensibility to the world stage.

His time at Parsons has given him the tools to navigate the nuanced theatrical politics of achieving hyper-local and trans-national social justice. Trusting in his ability to design a more ethical, equitable and enjoyable planet, Drew has launched a campaign for President of the United States for the year 2036.

section 4 Design and Urban Ecologies MSC Anchoring the Inbetween City by William Morrish

“What is possible for people to do with each other is largely a question of what it is that exists between them, and how this ‘between’ can be shaped as active points of reference, connection, and anchorage.”

(Abdou Maliq Simone, Cities of Uncertainty; Jakarta, the Urban Majority, and Inventive Political Technologies Theory, Culture & Society 2013 30:43 http://tcs.sagepub.com/)

Human activity has contributed to an abrupt shift in the Earth’s environment. This will cause many changes. While the exact nature of the changes is not known, it is possible that global urban turbulence and ecological collapse lie in the future and it is possible that these could be averted by careful choices. But we cannot move forward until we recognize this radically different “urban nature” lies not outside our everyday city life in some distant melting glacier, nor flooding poor country. Recent myopic political rhetoric, economic polices, and outdated urban development models are following this outside approach fortifying only a city’s strong ties in an inside and outside urban dialectic concentrating on the making of protective SMART City urban enclaves, privatizing of the commons, fear of migrating ideas and people, and big data fueled technology industry proposing miracles to normalize outside threats.

The following group of nine talented and passionate design and urban ecology graduate students through their urban projects propose a counter narrative to existing urban development models that seek to ameliorate climate and urbanization impacts to our cities.

In different ways each project has a common desire to shift our prospect from the periphery or margins of urban intervention towards in between city territories, such the writing of inclusive city narratives, setting sustaining urban habits, capturing the refracting forces embedded within our ecological prism, and reinforce the interpersonal episodes that local people use toco-construct collective city building process strengthen the mesh-works of interconnective social and ecological “weak ties” that alter their relationships each other, by changing people from users/consumers to city co-producers.

A graduate thesis for students in the Design and Urban Ecologies program is a two semester studio based design process of cycling through primary research, encountering complex urban societal congestion and experiencing the social spaces of confrontation, seeking ways in which to understand how the field of design and urban ecologies might play a constructive role as an intermediary turning Simone’s words, reinforce, connective and anchorage into reality. They did this by turning their creative energy into exploring the ordinary everyday spaces and processes that define and sustain a just city; such as visualizing zero waste flows, empowering

canners through Sure We Can, re-connected a fractured Detroit through those that live on 8 mile road, joining the battle on New York City’s urban frontier through debates on the future of Public School’s 8 and 307, cultivating ecological turbulence in the farm field ditches surrounding Cleveland, Ohio, redirecting remittance economy spawned from Sri Lanka’s civil turmoil and global capitalist interventions towards to making of city’s of hope, learning the city street language of urban climate migrants, filming the hyper atmospheres of a city’s future through the frame of an aging elevated waterfront highway, and expanding a city’s urban mobility options through directing the power shifts in transitioning city agency leadership.

Collectively they discovered divergent forces and common threads between each of their investigations as to language, human experiences, spatial structure and knowledge.

Second they grounded themselves in a problem through exploration of an existing social crisis, assessment of urban projects or an historic urban situation to investigate the ways in which people collectively “designed” their decision to proceed forward with a particular direction, and explored ways in which solutions were valued and changed over time. Through shared conversations about their research in class and with partners, each student has produced a deep description of an urban question. They have set the design terms by which they will name and frame the entry way questions to be addressed with their community partners, revealing how their ideas for making the strong and weak ties that operate in Simone’s space in between and how they might be valued and made by people co-producing spaces that support social, natural and political ecologies for a just urban society.

01.

Beyond Ruin and Recovery: Mapping Transnational Urban Violence in the Afterlife of the Sri Lankan Civil War by K. Kartik Amarnath

With the continued exacerbation of global economic, political, and environmental crises, the world will continue to experience the radical dispersal of populations from their historically occupied regions. Following violent episodes such as war, environmental catastrophe, or political upheaval, today’s post-conflict, postdisaster, and recovery regimes mobilize in ways that mask and/or erase the problems of rapidly integrating traumatized landscapes into the global neoliberal economy. Inherent to the shock of internationalizing traumatized landscapes emerging from catastrophes are uneven development processes and shifting relations of violence and repression. Since the

violent conclusion in 2009 of Sri Lanka’s decadeslong ethnic Civil War, the island nation has been internationally touted as emerging from war into a post-conflict reality. This thesis critically examines the consequences of outdated models of recovery for Sri Lanka’s post-crisis/ post-conflict development, foregrounding the experiences of landscapes traumatized by multiple series of forced displacements due to civil conflict and environmental catastrophe.

Sri Lanka provides an important study into post-conflict urbanism not only due to its perceived emergence from one of the world’s longest and most intractable armed conflicts, but also its geostrategic position in the Indian Ocean, and the presence of the island’s growing diaspora in the post-conflict era, many of whom remain in exile. Strategically, Sri Lanka sits at the crossroads of the world’s most important east-west shipping routes, attracting major transnational actors vying to develop and securitize the island’s infrastructural and port potential in the aftermath of war. The island’s sudden integration of into transnational economic and political flows have proliferated urban crises, particularly in vulnerable regions of the North and East affected by decades of war, climate change, and the 2004 tsunami.

Amid decades of compounding crises, globally displaced and dispersed Sri Lankans continue to support livelihoods on the island in the face of an internationalized post-war agenda of unprecedented urbanization.

With pressures arising from rapid urbanization and global economic integration, the design element of this project aims to operationalize alternative transnational flows from the island’s growing diaspora to facilitate more equitable, just, and democratic urban practices. In doing so, this project points towards restructuring transnational politics and activism, foregrounding the urban dimensions of the island’s post-conflict development. In war ravaged regions, historically home to the island’s minority ethnic groups, close to 1 in 3 people now live outside of the island, while the capital city of Colombo has become a Tamil-speaking majority city. The spatial and temporal distance between dispersed families and their homelands, entrench particular political and psychic formations unmindful of today’s urbanization and its consequences.

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Relationships between diaspora and ‘homeland’ are complicated, especially when communal violence and catastrophe led to traumatic uprooting and dispersal. While spatial and temporal distance exists, an intimate connection with ‘homeland’ also persists and is inflected by experiences of trauma both preand post-migration. The experiences of trauma, memory, and spatiotemporal distance lead to transnational social, political, and financial practices with very profound consequences for Sri Lanka’s built environment. For example, the Sri Lankan Tamil families have rapidly invested in rebuilding homes, temples, and schools.

However, these financial investments in fixed assets contribute to spiking land prices in warravaged regions, the reconsolidation of caste hierarchies, and subtly entrench the violence of state-sponsored neoliberal urbanization. In this regard, Aihwa Ong states, “Diasporas do not just transcend or subvert the nation-state’s political and economic discipline and liberate their agents – in fact, they are just as likely to strengthen them.” While politicized Tamils outside the island are stigmatized as threats to national unity by the Sri Lankan polity, from an urban lens transnational Tamil practices have in fact “strengthened” the “nation-state’s political and economic discipline”, which prioritizes the re-orientation of war ravaged landscapes to appease global neoliberal interests.

To achieve more just and equitable transnational flows, I employ multiple forms of cartography to develop a conceptual tool for uprooted Tamils to critically reflect upon the interplay of memory, trauma, spatiotemporal distance, and the current ‘homeland’ landscape in the afterlife of war.

This operational design employs topological mapping of complex adaptive systems in a deep map framework. Thus, multi-scalar mapping identifies troubling commonalities between dominant typologies of transnationally driven urbanization in post-conflict Sri Lanka – namely reconstruction, logistics, and diaspora development. Identifying commonalities, audiences uprooted from Sri Lanka can envision alternative forms of organizing global remittance flows to mitigate the neoliberalizing effects of transnationally facilitated urban practices as communities struggle to find postwar stability.

To achieve more just and equitable transnational flows...

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02.

Transitioning Agencies Reframing Disruptions Planning As a Gateway for Better Transit in New York City by Renata Benigno

Three years from now, New York City will face one of the biggest disruptions it has ever experienced: the 1-year (up to 3-year) shutdown of the Canarsie Tube, the L Line subway tunnel that carries 200,000 passengers a day in the under-river connection between East Manhattan and North Brooklyn. Besides the large impact over L commuters’ daily lives, the closure will also impact other transportation systems, to which this high number of passengers will have to divert. Furthermore, there will be great impact for businesses located in the areas surrounding the L Line subway stations.

While this means bad news for many New Yorkers, the shutdown could also be seen

as a necessary evil to reconstruct one of the many public transit infrastructures that have faced underfunding for decades of neglect from elected officials. Moreover, it could become the greatest opportunity the MTA NYCT (Metropolitan Transportation Authority – New York City Transit) has ever had to rethink the way it plans long-term disruptions.

Along time, crises have been major catalysts for changes and enhancements regarding public transit. This research was inspired by the assumption that lessons learned in situations of crisis can inform decisions made by public authorities on a regular basis, in order to renovate strategies and better respond to daily constraints regarding service delivery. Through the analysis of major subway disruptions that have distressed the MTA NYCT since Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012, this study scrutinizes examples of measures that were put in place immediately after the storm that could lead to long-term changes in policies and guidelines that inform daily procedures inside the agency.

Three case studies were selected for that purpose, whether they were short-term interruptions of service (days long) or long-term closures of lines and stations for renovation purposes (months or years long). Based on the understanding of how the agency conducted these processes of decision-making and how the final resolution was communicated to the public, it became clear that the agency is missing good opportunities to apply the knowledge gained through its response to Sandy in the planning process of the Canarsie shutdown.

Through the monitoring of recent news about the topic and MTA NYCT press releases, interviews with authority employees and community-based organizations, the research identified that the discussion around the shutdown has been largely confrontational, rather than conversational. What soon becomes clear is that decision-making regarding transportation matters is seen as isolated events in which public participation involves providing citizens the chance to vote for what they consider the best alternative among a set of options previously determined. The hypothesis defended is that without a solid foundation of trust between the agency and the population it serves, chances are that isolated attempts

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to involve the public in processes of decisionmaking will be perceived with skepticism and discontent.

This study claims that there is a need to understand decision-making as a continuous process, through which the agency and the public work cooperatively together along time in order to define the best path on how to proceed. In that context, the study culminates with a proposal to create a space inside the MTA NYCT, where human-centered design is at the core of decision-making. This proposal intends to establish a relation of trust between the agency and citizens, and bridge the gap between what people expect and what the MTA NYCT can actually deliver. By promoting conversations with transparency and clarity, and building trust among stakeholders, this space would allow for constructive conversations rather than argumentation induced by the polarization of ideas and ideals.

While such space does not exist inside the MTA NYCT, it becomes timely to discuss its creation based on the current situation inside the agency.

With recent internal changes taking place inside the agency, the research has identified an institutional shift that creates the desired conditions to revise outdated procedures.

Moreover, it identifies an opportunity to reestablish trust with the public by conducting constructive conversations regarding service disruptions, rather than instigating argumentation among the stakeholders involved.

Ultimately, the proposal brings to light the discussion of how hard systems such as rail services can become more flexible in order to face future challenges. Furthermore, it considers that the relevance of the Canarsie Line shutdown rests on its potential to become a precedent situation in which those changes can be prototyped and improved. The contribution of this thesis resides in its understanding that, by promoting changes from inside out, the MTA NYCT can establish an environment that encourages innovation, renovates the way the authority is perceived by citizens and ultimately revitalizes how public transit is planned in New York City.

...by promoting conversations with transparency and clarity, and building trust among stakeholders...

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Total Enrollment in K-8 Schools, Community School District 16 2005-06 to 2014-15

Proposed Zone Lines – Draft Scenario

Source: New York City Department of Education

10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000 0

2005-06

2006-07

2007-08

2008-09

2009-10

2010-11

District Schools Produced by Max Freedman for the Brooklyn Movement Center, November 2015.

2011-12

2012-13

2013-14

2014-15

Charter Schools

Preliminary Draft - For discussion purposes

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03.

The Future of Public Schools on the ‘Urban Frontier’: History and Equity in a Changing City by Max Freedman

The politics of public education have been a battleground for long-term processes of inequitable urban development at least since the Great Migration, when hundreds of thousands of African-Americans came to Northern cities in search of disappearing industrial work.

New York City has been dotted with “highly stratified postindustrial landscapes in which wealthy white professionals lived adjacent to “...increasingly poor African Americans and Latinos” ever since (Suleiman Osman), but the conflicts arising from this juxtaposition are becoming more frequent as gentrification expands its spatial reach.

During my first year in the Design and Urban Ecologies program, I focused primarily on housing justice. But as an educator, I was interested in the convergence of housing and education: because schools are entangled in the housing market, but also because of schools’ potential to lay the foundations for social transformation.

Therefore, I set out to investigate not only how public schools reflect the profoundly inequitable processes of neoliberal urban development reshaping New York City, but also how schools might become a site to disrupt these same processes.

I began by following the contentious public approval process for a plan to redraw the attendance zones of two neighboring elementary schools in Brooklyn Heights and Dumbo: P.S. 8, overcrowded and predominantly wealthy, white, and Asian; and P.S. 307, under-enrolled and predominantly poor, Black, and Latino.

How and why did P.S. 8 become overcrowded and P.S. 307 under-enrolled? P.S. 307 will receive more attention and resources by incorporating wealthier students crowded out of P.S. 8, but at what cost to the agency and stability of current students and families? These questions are urgent for any under-enrolled schools on the ‘urban frontier.’

Every parent holds an incalculable stake in their child’s education, but the stakes are highest for poor families of color at risk of physical and cultural displacement. I live within the bounds of Community School District 16 in BedfordStuyvesant: one of the largest and most historic Black neighborhoods in the United States, now one of the least affordable in Brooklyn. As a result of both gentrification and the charter school movement, District 16 schools have seen their enrollment decline dramatically in the last ten years; the district as a whole is now enrolled at just 53% of its total capacity.

Because schools and neighborhoods have a reciprocal relationship—changes in one can accelerate changes to the other—any actions taken to address what has now been framed as an ‘enrollment crisis’ in District 16 will almost certainly reverberate beyond the school walls.

As I looked into the history of public schools in Brooklyn and Bed-Stuy, I was struck by how the urgencies and strategies of the past echo in contemporary struggles. These histories remind us that the real crisis is not one of enrollment, but an ongoing, dynamic crisis of equity in a changing city.

various moments over the course of the last fifty years: 1.

Decentralized administration 2. School choice policies 3. School integration None of these is inherently a bad idea, but they are flawed proxies for equity. As with most urban policies in the neoliberal city, even when undertaken in the name of equity, these interventions are consistently designed to treat only the symptoms of inequity, never the disease.

As Pauline Lipman argues, “education is both shaped by and deeply implicated in globalized political, economic, and ideological processes that have been redefining cities over the past 25 years.” As long as we remain unprepared to discuss public education in the context of these global processes, and unwilling to address the structural and historical roots of inequity—racism, poverty, and power—we are unlikely to achieve equity within and across our public schools.

I was inspired by my research to create the Central Brooklyn School Mapping Project, an interactive online tool visualizing enrollment and population changes in District 16 from 1970 to the present. The map layers school data on top of census data to emphasize the relationship between larger patterns of change and what happens in schools.

This was an enormous data collection and restructuring project, but the data is only the beginning. I am working with the Brooklyn Movement Center, a grassroots organizing hub in Bed-Stuy, to develop a local strategy to operationalize this information.

I also hope to use the map as the foundation for an oral history project. As a longtime District 16 parent leader told me, “It doesn’t matter whether there’s new people or the same old people; it’s supposed to evolve. I just care that the new people don’t discount the people who are here.

Change didn’t happen overnight, and what was gotten was gotten through a fight.”

I identified three recurring categories of institutionalized intervention that have been attempted, abandoned, and resurrected at

“

...how the urgencies and strategies of the past echo in contemporary struggles.

”

04.

Visualizing Zero Waste: Future Scenarios for New York City by Bernardo Loureiro

New York City has a waste system that is complex, financially expensive, environmentally damaging, and socially unequal. Since 2002, the city has no facility for waste disposal within its boundaries. As a result, most of its waste is transported on trucks to other states, sometimes more than 500 miles away. Waste infrastructure is also highly concentrated within the city, overburdening a few outer-borough communities. This combination of long-distance waste export with in-city waste concentration produces significant financial, environmental, and social issues.

In the last two decades, several administrations have attempted to address these issues through different plans and proposals. The most recent is the OneNYC plan of 2015, which set the goal of sending zero waste to landfills by 2030. Over the same period, organizations and communities have produced reports and recommendations, and established alternatives to the main waste system, such as community composting and canning.

In spite of considerable positive changes to NYC’s waste system over the last two decades, the main financial, environmental, and social issues remain. In current discussions, most stakeholders agree that the current system must change, including community organizations, the city government, advocates, and some private actors.

systems because waste is moved several times throughout its life-cycle, and many environmental and social issues result from its transport; and because similar issues as well as conflicts result from the siting of waste infrastructure, such as transfer stations, landfills, and incinerators.

This model is not intended to provide simple answers to the current challenges of NYC’s waste system. Instead, it is meant as a tool to facilitate discussion, advocacy, and policy-making on waste. For this reason, as part of this thesis I’ve also conducted a scenario-building workshop, using this modeling tool with a variety of stakeholders. The main point of the workshop was to build desirable future scenarios and to discuss ways and to achieving them.

Understanding NYC’s waste system is the first necessary step in the direction to change it. By combining my analysis, the use of the model I’ve developed, the results from the scenario-building workshop, and interviews with stakeholders, I have made some recommendations for NYC’s waste system. I believe that greater stakeholder collaboration, a clearer understanding of the waste system, and a redefinition of waste and our practices in relation to it are fundamental to achieve a truly zero waste New York City.

Although stakeholders may agree on outcomes, there is a widespread difficulty in understanding the waste system and the effects of transforming it holistically. I believe that removing this difficulty could further stakeholders ability to work cooperatively in order to change this system.

This thesis is an attempt to intervene in this gap of understanding. I do so by designing a geographic modeling tool, which allows to visualize the current waste system and to test future scenarios. I believe using this tool could lead stakeholders to find points of convergence and to be able to better discuss divergences.

I believe using a geographic model is fundamental to understand waste

“

...to facilitate discussion, advocacy, and policy-making on waste.

”

Abstract - Seeing Toronto Through an Expressway: Takeaways from the 2015 East Gardiner Debate May 3rd, 2016 Walter S. Petrichyn

The ecology of stakeholders, institutions, built environment factors and other players in the 2015 Gardiner East decision.

In 2015, Toronto city council voted to recreate an elevated expressway link instead of tearing it down. The decision opened the opportunity for various perspectives to consider in how a style of infrastructure, an elevated expressway, fits into the urban fabric of 21st century life. This subject is notoriously controversial due to local political inaction on maintaining the east section, a lack of political will for future plans towards this infrastructure, and the accepted notion among many urban critics the plan to recreate an elevated expressway link is 20th century planning.

The Gardiner East decision created direct and indirect conservations on the surrounding area, as well as across the city, provincial and globally regarding the city’s priorities. Exploring this issue, other themes such as the city’s housing crisis and the near full capacity shelter system were relevant to compare what priorities council is focusing on. It may not be fiscally fair to compare social services, housing and homeless, to the need of transportation infrastructure, but many people saw a proposed contested capital project to ask the question: Why put over one billion dollars, projected over a hundred years, into an unnecessary project when you can invest into mass transit? Into the repairs needed for Toronto’s community housing catalog?

Placing pressing social service needs, as well as other critical hard infrastructure needs (e.g.. mass transit) sparked

05.

Seeing Toronto Through an Expressway: Takeaways from the 2015 East Gardiner Debate by Walter Petrichyn

In 2015, Toronto city council voted to recreate an elevated expressway link instead of tearing it down. The decision opened the opportunity for various perspectives to consider in how a style of infrastructure, an elevated expressway, fits into the urban fabric of 21st century life. This subject is notoriously controversial due to local political inaction on maintaining the east section, a lack of political will for future plans towards this infrastructure, and the accepted notion among many urban critics the plan to recreate an elevated expressway link is 20th century planning.

The Gardiner East decision created direct and indirect conservations on the surrounding area, as well as across the city, provincial and globally regarding the city’s priorities. Exploring this issue, other themes such as the city’s housing crisis and the near full capacity shelter system were relevant to compare what priorities council is focusing on. It may not be fiscally fair to compare social services, housing and homeless, to the need of transportation infrastructure, but many people saw a proposed contested capital project to ask the question: Why put over one billion dollars, projected over a hundred years, into an unnecessary project when you can invest into mass transit? Into the repairs needed for Toronto’s community housing catalog?

Placing pressing social service needs, as well as other critical hard infrastructure needs (e.g.. mass transit) sparked conversations on what costs the Gardiner East project will create for Toronto’s future. I think my research adds meaning to the complexity. What does it mean when a huge infrastructure project, like the Gardiner East, comes into reality when evidence contradicts the urgent necessity of it?

The threat of added productivity costs to goods movement brought out all the economic and financial interests to sway council to reject the remove option. Is it ok for politics to trump sound decision making if no ommunity backlash occurs?

There were multiple cases of falling debris from the elevated Gardiner stretching back to 2012. In that same year, independent ngineers studied the structure and declared half of the structure was unstable. Public safety was at risk. The political indecision over what to do, as well as political maneuvering stopped the Environmental Assessment process in 2012 then resurfaced after the Ford years perpetuated the state of crisis. Just make a decision city staff said in 2015; they recommended removal in 2014. The mayor championed the hybrid option, keeping the highway link between the Gardiner and the DVP and opening up land for development by tearing down ramps east of the Don River, as well as convincing some councillors to vote with him. The vote was almost split on the hybrid: 24 to 21. In March of 2016, council voted on a preferred alternative of hybrid which pushes the expressway as far away from the Keating Channel, opening more land

“

for development while being more expensive than the option chosen last June.

I spent one month in Toronto and interviewed seven city councillors, one historian, a professor, two university students, the former chief planner of Toronto, the head designers of the Under Gardiner project and a friend who lives right by the Gardiner. I visited three archives: Toronto Reference Library, Toronto Archives, and York University’s Clara Thomas Archives. I also attended a public consultation meeting for the fifth and final round for the Gardiner East Environmental Assessment.

The thesis is interested in the neighbouring areas to the link between the Gardiner and the Don Valley Parkway, and attempts to untangle some of the complexities that arise from these urbanized spaces. People who are interested in this thesis would be engaged to understand how a proposed infrastructural project divides and connects citizens towards the 21st century. The various dichotomies coming from this debate were common city themes: suburbs vs. downtown and cars vs. bikes / mass transit, liberals vs. conservatives. The thesis also covers relevant local historical moments.

I took thousands of photographs, and over ten audio recorded interviews to create a short documentary about the 2015 Gardiner decision.

This thesis was written at the same time as the film’s production. Consider the film and thesis as complementary materials to each other.

The principle of spending over a billion dollars projected over 100 years on an elevated expressway, there is something more to that, a cost to the city’s soul, ambiance and personality.

...to untangle some of the complexities that arise from these urbanized spaces.

”

06.

Urbanization in Motion.

Forces of Displacement: From Crisis into the City by Nadine Rachid

In 2010 during the UNFCCC’s 16th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP16), the international community officially accepted mobility as an informal adaptation mechanism to climate change, with the expectation that most of this movement will be directed towards cities. Cities across the world, such as Istanbul, Beirut, Amman, Berlin, and Dhaka, to name a few, have recently become ultimate destinations for local and cross-border mobility caused by environmental, economic and political upheaval.

The popular image of war refugees and climate change migrants living in temporary settlements is no longer viable: 60% of the world’s refugees and 80% of world’s internally displaced people live in urban areas. Therefore, through this research project I will argue that what the world is witnessing today is not only a shortterm displacement challenge, rather a rapid urbanization process that occurs under dire socio-economic, political and environmental conditions. I will refer to this process of “displacement-to-urbanization” as Urbanization in Motion.

This process of Urbanization in Motion is only expected to increase as the impact of climate change affect more people globally. As people flee their farmlands towns and cities due to climate change and other related events, people will seek new places to the continuity of their lives. The core of this project is not to find ways to stop this process through design, policy, or development projects; rather it is to imagine and design processes for cities to be able to absorb it.

The argument and proposal of this project are based on a critical look at the crisis narrative that is typically associated with forced displacement. Situations that involve large scale and abrupt displacement are considered moments of crisis and consequently, tend to fall under humanitarian aid mandates. However, the process of Urbanization in Motion, where people seek cities for refuge, is challenging the go-to mechanisms of humanitarian aid. Urbanization in Motion removes these “moments of crisis” out of the controlled spaces of humanitarian aid whether in temporary camps and rural areas, and brings them into dynamic urban settings, changing the context around humanitarian aid approaches. With that, Urbanization in Motions blurs the lines between humanitarian needs and urban challenges and involves, directly and indirectly, new agencies, institutions, communities and actors. Despite these changes in the context of forced displacement, the approaches of government agencies and aid organizations in urban settings remain structured around the crisis lens: temporary, reactive and dependent on traditional crisis management approaches.

“

The aim of this project is to introduce a new lens through which aid organizations and government agencies view and approach the urban challenges that accompany the process of Urbanization in Motion. This lens, specific to the urban context, does not aim to provide “solutions” for “problems,” rather, it reframes the narrative around these urban challenges in order to open up opportunities for collaborations and partnerships with organization, agencies and interests involved in this complex process, that go beyond traditional crisis management approaches. Ultimately, this urban lens aims to shift the discourse around Urbanization in Motion from being limited to the crisis lens to become an urban narrative: dynamic, flexible and resilient: rooted in rebuilding communities and supporting existing and emerging social entities in the city as a whole.

Urbanization in Motion is occurring as we speak in different places across the world, but these days it is mostly evident in the recent and ongoing conflict in Syria. The conflict has displaced millions of people internally and pushed others into cities in neighboring countries. Focusing on this crisis, the project explores how the process of Urbanization in Motion is manifesting in Istanbul, one of Syria’s major neighboring cities currently hosting over 350,000 Syrian refugees. Based on fieldwork and analytical research, the project applies the urban lens to challenges identified in Istanbul in order to demonstrate a framework that brings forth spaces for productive collaborations and partnerships with multiple stakeholders The urban lens is the beginning of an approach for the city dealing with moments of crisis. The lens uses the concept of the city as an active form that presents spaces for coexistence and co-production, in order to expose and connect an insurgent urban system that acts as social safety net in these moments of crisis.

...to untangle some of the complexities that arise from these urbanized spaces.

”

All efforts to connect metropolitan Detroit have, for the past half-century, been focused on megaprojects within the 7.2 square miles of greater downtown.

What if we re-centered the conversation? The northern border of the city proper, 8 Mile Road, is the center of the region’s population and its conflicts. This is the place where change must begin.

07.

The 8 Mile Road Connections Initiative by Michael Stepniak

place of 2 million people, grand boulevards and a growing middle class. This city never existed in its idealized form, and even if it did, it was a tiny part of the region’s 8,000 year history of inhabitation. The core of the city founded by the French in 1701 is still referred to as the center, yet it is the center of nothing. The geography of Detroit has expanded as its population of 4.3 million moves outward.

The geometric center of the region’s population, and its conflicts is 8 Mile Road, the 20 mile long northern border of the city proper. In addition to being a giant infrastructure, the road has a mythic status both locally and in pop culture as a place of segregation, class conflict and violence.

Many communities in Detroit have identified abandoned land, a thing that often has no real market value, as an opportunity from which communities can extract value. Groups often use community gardening to transform these spaces, and in doing so create a vehicle through which social networks are established through collective labor towards common goals. In this way, residents inhabit their neighborhoods as a political act, and produce a mechanism for local control.

The neighborhoods on the Detroit-Eastpointe border are different. Life does not end at 8 Mile, and without abandoned land, another opportunity must be identified. 8 Mile Road is the defining feature of this place, and because of its importance in multiple contexts the public spaces of 8 Mile are the material from which communities can extract value. This starts with a free cup of coffee.

Detroit is a place of municipal, racial, infrastructural and economic divides, fracturing the metropolitan region into small pieces. There is no single solution to this. Many megaprojects have been attempted over the past half century, and Detroit remains divided. Before the pieces can be bound together, bridges must be built within these neighborhoods that empower the people who live there.

There is nostalgia for a city that once was, the

There is no coffee shop on 8 Mile. Public space is dwarfed by the massive automobile spaces.

The sidewalks on the Detroit-Eastpointe border has seen its share of violent crime. In response to this sidewalk culture, a portable coffee stand will be set up, once per week near bus stops.

It will offer community mapping projects that establish a resident-driven process that will: map the neighborhood, create a community knowledge library, and inform an online data portal. Each week, the outcome of the previous week’s mapping will be displayed, and a new

“

topic decided upon.

Simply by existing, the free coffee place (FCP) will upend the nature of 8 Mile’s public space: from a place to hurry through, to a place to converse, exchange ideas and to share food and drink. Residents will form social networks through working collectively to decide mapping topics, using the library, and using the collective body of knowledge as a decision-making tool.

Mapping is a tool of technocrats: urban planners, policy makers and real estate people. Cities are not a series of engineering and economic problems to be solved as one would an equation.

As users of the FCP build their knowledge, and that data is fed into the online data portal, it will become a resource for academics and planners.

As residents adapt mapping as a tool to express their ideas about their spaces, they will build bridges between themselves and planning professionals.

Residents from both sides of 8 Mile Road who were strangers will be linked, part of an intermunicipal social network. Out of social networks that are engaged in collective efforts toward common goals spring possibilities: activism, small business incubation, skill sharing and neighborhood improvements are all possible externalities. These things lead to a building of political capital for an 8 Mile Road community that crosses borders.

There is dominant urban narrative that displaces the people who live in the center of the region to the periphery of the future of their city. Change starts with recognizing that the region is defined by people living in the middle. By using 8 Mile Road, as the material from which to create new urban space to inhabit politically, residents can build bridges between themselves and between planners and policy makers, establishing a mechanism for local control and influence.

...social networks that are engaged in collective efforts toward common goals spring possibilities...

”

FOSTERING MOVEMENT BY MEDIATING EXISTING INCENTIVE WITH A PRODUCTIVE DITCH AS THE CATALYST.

TURBID FLOWS

SOCIO-POLITICAL

INFRASTRUCTURAL

HYDROLOGICAL

ALGAL

08.

Turbid Flows: Algal blooms in Lake Erie by Tamara Streefland

Water is embedded in and forms a connective tissue between almost everything we see around us. Society’s need for water, as well as its attempt to tame and control it, have shaped our social and physical environments as water flows through rivers to oceans, through all domains of social life across physical and administrative boundaries. However, Industrialization, privatization, a growing population amongst many other factors have resulted in congested water ecologies. Water has become a highly contested resource, used for waste disposal, recreation, manufacturing, mining and agriculture.

Unless the competing demands on our ecosystems and resulting turbidities in both governance processes and in the quality of water are addressed in holistic manners, we will soon lack access to good quality water, and extreme water events will increasingly affect the planet and its people, with most severe consequences for those already living in marginal conditions. In light of climate change induced intensive rain events and hot summers, harmful algae blooms are likely to intensify in the following years jeopardizing fresh water sources in the urban centres around Lake Erie.

Dear traveler, I will take you on a journey through a turbid ecology. We will take our departure on August 2014, when the residents of Toledo, Ohio were advised not to drink the water from their faucets due to the presence of toxins caused by massive harmful algal blooms in their drinking water source, Lake Erie. People prepared for days without water, standing in lines at grocery stores. Some even crossing the border to Canada, packed with as many empty containers as they could find. Lake Erie had turned turbid green and Toledo, ones called the City of glass, transformed into the City of the empty glass.

Although, some incentive systems to ameliorate this situation have been proposed by governments and the other stakeholders, the tensions that underlie this problem seem to prevent an adequate and integrated response to successful divert the algal blooms. Diverging definitions of the problem, inabilities to take responsibility and lack of clear action hamper the proposed mitigations in the saturated Maumee waterscape. The water scape is managed in a cloud of turbidity.

Who is responsible? How can different actors communicate and work together?

In this journey we immerse ourselves in this multi-facetted landscape trying to make sense of it all. We run into many different phenomena both expected and unexpected, ranging from skeptical farmers to demoralized government officials and from flowing phosphorus particles to a fast streams of reports. The source of this issue may lay in the farming systems of the hinterland, but the consequences lay in the drinking water supply for the surrounding communities. How can we make sense of the turbidity of this congested system? Is there a

“

way to accelerate towards a persistent clear state? How can we look at this case through a prismatic sphere, interconnected over time and space?

Trained as an earth scientist, my immediate instinct was to dive into chemical and physical hydrology. And yes that’s where we will start our journey. We will the examine the turbid web of ecological, social, institutional and economic elements that are connected by weaker and stronger linkages which are not always transparent and which we often don’t fully apprehend. We will travel back in history through literature, aggregate the socio-political landscape, take a bird’s eye view through GIS analysis, climb some stack of reports and most Importantly we will engage in conversations with key species of this ecosystem.

I will also tell you about theory that I have been reading throughout my journey, which have shaped my perception and experience of the waterscape of the Maumee watershed, and I hope will impact yours too. We will encounter a lot of energy and a wide variety of actors, in search of altering the status quo and affecting the hydrological response of the Maumee watershed. This is where I will introduce my design proposal to you, fellow traveller: a multi-phase design strategy that draws on existing structures and incentives, funding mechanisms, on-going research and is appealing to all players involved while addressing the nutrient run-off in the Maumee watershed. My design mediates the existing energy through reconfiguring existing puzzle pieces that are within the Maumee watershed into to a comprehensive plan that acts as catalyst, guiding the pressures that are floating in this meshwork, while taking the turbidity in the diverse realms into account.

Fellow traveller, join me on this voyage and I will show you how this can all start with a productive ditch.

...a multi-phase design strategy that draws on existing structures and incentives, funding mechanisms, on-going research...

”

09.

Reimagining informality and participation in New York City’s waste system by Silvia Xavier

The city of New York has developed parallel systems to deal with the complex nature of the materials that are discarded by its inhabitants.

While the city relies on the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) and on private companies to collect the residential and the commercial waste, there exists a system formed by autonomous waste pickers. Commonly known as canners, they operate under the structure of the Returnable Container Act, a state law created in 1989 to incentivize recycling. Canners walk the streets collecting discarded beverage containers that can be exchanged for five cents each, in authorized redemption centers.

The activity of canners aligns with the city’s goals, as it contributes to retrieve materials for recycling. However, the monetary value attributed to certain discarded materials creates tensions between these existing systems. The containers collected by the canners reduce the revenues that the city would receive by selling these materials to the recycling industry.

Further, the city authorities argue that, by collecting from the curbside, canners are stealing from DSNY’s property. The right of the city authorities to claim property over waste is obscure and the argument about the collection cost, although coherent, only focuses on the economic aspects and thereby neglects the social benefits of the activities that the canners engage in.

This controversial dispute between public authorities and waste pickers over New York City’s valuable recyclables opens the ground for a timely discussion about waste management in the city. The systems that move the discarded materials in the city are on the verge to change. Released in 2015, the OneNYC plan sets ambitious goals for sustainability in the waste system, which demands massive changes on behavioral, legal and technical dimensions. In this context, can canners be allies to achieve the city’s goal of zero waste to landfills by 2030?

Can we reframe the current waste management practices to promote the recognition of autonomous waste pickers as part of NYC’s waste system?

The situation of waste pickers in New York City is not isolated. My active engagement to understand the ecologies of the waste picking systems led me to research about diverse contexts and different frameworks that result in the inclusion or exclusion of waste

“

pickers worldwide. During my field research in Sao Paulo and New York City, I was able to understand the diverse realities of waste picking through extensive interviews and interactions with waste pickers. At the same time, I was able to map their day to day activities, not only to create unique data sets to visualize their dynamics, but also to humanize the process of waste picking.

The inclusion of waste pickers in the future of the city’s waste management can bring economic, social and environmental benefits.

In order to trace a holistic plan for an inclusive system there is a demand for action on several spheres. For instance, to promote inclusion of waste pickers in the institutional sphere, the legitimization of the activity and a consistent plan to collect data are vital steps to begin with.

Further, for inclusion of waste pickers on the social sphere, actions to instigate changes in behavior and public perception are necessary.

In this context, my practice engages with existing initiatives in order to shift the narrative and create space for an inclusionary conversation about the participation of waste pickers in the future of NYC’s waste system. My intervention connects the Brazilian community based organization, Pimp My Carroça, with NYC’s community hub, Sure We Can. By coordinating this collaborative action, which engaged artists and designers to provide canners with enhanced equipment and reshaped carts, I aim to achieve three main goals. First, to improve the canners’ working conditions and to increase their self-esteem and pride. Second, to trigger changes in the relationship between canners and other citizens in the streets, dissolving social barriers and promoting approximation. Third, to consolidate an international collaboration and experience exchange between the group in Sao Paulo and the group in New York.

I believe that it is crucial to address the loopholes in relation to the recognition of canners in the institutional sphere. My practice initiates a collaborative process that aims to legitimatize the canners’ activity through community based social recognition. Further, the collaboration is a means to create a space to amplify the discussions about the waste pickers’ participation in the waste system and to build solidarity across citizens.

...to improve the canners’ working conditions and to increase their self-esteem and pride.

”

BIOS K. Kartik Amarnath

Renata Benigno

Max Freedman

is a recent graduate holding a BA in Biology with minors in Anthropology and Philosophy. He spent his childhood living in four countries and graduated from high school at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, India. For the 2013-2014 academic year, Kartik was in Kuala Lumpur researching accessibility and agency for the historic blind community of his mother’s childhood neighborhood.

is Brazilian and received her bachelor in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of Brasilia. She has worked as an intern in different architecture offices in her city and later as an architect of real estate development at Odebrecht Realizações, where she worked on various projects, in multidisciplinary groups. After completing her master program, she plans to engage with innovative urban practices and collaborate with the creation of new ways to reshape the urban.

is a theater artist, history teacher, and urban something-or-other raised in Los Angeles and based in BedfordStuyvesant, Brooklyn. He is a Senior Educator at the New-York Historical Society and a Joker with Theatre of the Oppressed NYC. He previously served in made-up roles with made-up titles at the intersection of performance and community engagement in New York City and Washington, DC. B.A. Northwestern University.

Bernardo Loureiro

Walter Petrichyn

Nadine Rachid

is an urbanist and architect from São Paulo, Brazil. He is mainly interested in the intersection of cities and landscapes, and in the materials and flows that underpin this relationship.

was born and raised in Windsor, Ontario. He received a Bachelor (Honors) of Arts at the University of Windsor in 2013, and studied at Concordia University in Montreal in 2010. His involvement in community engagement and his interests in urbanism, art, producing radio and films all emerged to find The New School to undergo a Master of Science degree in Design and Urban Ecologies.

is a Lebanese interior architect pursuing her MS in the Design and Urban Ecologies program on a Provost’s Scholarship, in addition to completing a post-graduate certificate in Sustainability Strategies.

She is interested in the interplay of community engagement strategies and planning processes and their role in shaping the built environment. She holds a BA in Interior Architecture from Notre Dame University in Lebanon.

Michael Stepniak

Tamara Streefland

Silvia Xavier

has worked in policy research and analysis in the public sector on issues including zoning, healthcare, and intermunicipal cooperation. He completed his BA in Urban Studies at Wayne State University. Michael is from Detroit, Michigan. He is a former construction and factory laborer, a local history buff, and sometime blogger of local urban issues.

is an urbanist and earth Scientist. She is committed to designing viable urban projects at the interface of social and natural resiliency. She is currently working on Constellation Project, a network of gathering spaces that are connected by vegetated flows of water infrastructure in Queens.

is a Brazilian designer who has worked in wood and furniture industry.

Currently living in New York, she is expanding her design practice, shifting from products and services to larger artifacts and systems, focusing on the study of urban infrastructures and material flows. Her goal is to engage in innovative and critical practices to address the continuous development of cities and the landscapes they create.

Parsons School of Design http://www.newschool.edu/parsons/ School of Design Strategies http://sds.parsons.edu/#highlights Design Dialogues http://sds.parsons.edu/designdialogues/ Theories of Urban Practice http://sds.parsons.edu/urbanpractice/

Book Design

Fernando Canteli de Castro Gamar Markarian Alexa Jansen

Cover Design

William Morrish Fernando Canteli de Castro

Š Copyright 2016 by Parsons The New School All rights reserved. Theories of Urban Practice: Actionable Theory may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

MA Theories of Urban Practice MSC Urban Design and Ecologies

School of Design Strategies