The Power of Design and the Design of Power: Equitable Urban Typologies Challenge

THE POWER OF DESIGN AND THE DESIGN OF POWER: Equitable Urban Typologies Challenge

FALL 2020

Alan M. Berger Rafi Segal

Studio Instructors Alan M. Berger Rafi Segal

Teaching Assistant Mohamad Nahleh

Students

Yufei Chen Gabriela Degetau Zanders Hugh Ebdy Sofia Gulaid Jiye Ha Xuan Lan Kuang-Chun Lo (Randy) Christopher Moyer Jariyaporn Prachasartta Lasse Rau Huiwen Shi Mona VijayKumar Ziyu Xu Lidia Cano Pecharroman

Mid-Term Review Critics Evren Uzer Dingliang Yang Susanne Schindler Kairos Shen Charlotte Lipschitz Rosalie Genevro Taylor Cain

Final Review Critics Alessandra Cianchetta Rob Lane Kairos Shen Rosalie Genevro Caesar McDowell Lorena Bello Neeraj Bhatia Alexander D’Hooghe

Introduction PART 1

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Dismantling the City: Object, Void, Network

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Mapping the American City: Narratives of Vulnerability

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Dismantling Boston

External Collaborators URBANICA

Cover Image (Top): Presentation of the completed Washington Park urban renewal plan to Boston’s Mayor and members of the board of the Boston. Redevelopment Authority, 14 Crawford Street. Freedom House Photographs. Date created (1960-1969) Cover Image (Bottom): Black Lives Matter protest, Boston. Ben Segal. (2020)

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PART 2

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Re-visioning the City: Equitable Typologies Challenge

Introduction Throughout its history, Urban Design (and allied design disciplines with a capital “D”) has been the practice of a privileged few. And as a manifestation of power, urban design has assisted in translating client(s’) desires to control the city through the shaping of objects and buildings, voids and landscapes, and infrastructural networks. Moreover, our accumulated urbanity parallels the constructions of cultural narratives and a supposed collective memory, reflected through what a society chooses to build and preserve, erase and destroy. Within the context of the American city, the protocols and processes through which cities are shaped, and their constituent urban elements and symbols, have served a world view of the parties in charge of the process, often not the majority of those affected by decisions. We acknowledge in this studio that Urban Design and its allied fields often fortify exclusivity over the process of city making, despite wildly optimistic claims of participatory process—which still must be translated into physical form by “D”esigners.

This studio seeks to challenge both the inherent and historic inequalities and exclusions which Urban Design entails as a discipline by asking the most critical and broadest of questions, yet demanding that physical plans—novel and radical typologies of equity— be produced as the result of the process. Whether visionary and futuristic, or quickly implementable, we require that these new typologies challenge the way the city is designed. Focusing on the question of agency, and while acknowledging the growing role of communal participation, we do not necessarily propose to discard the role of any allied fields as professional agents in creating and negotiating solutions at the urban scale. Rather, with a belief in the unique value of the urban designer, this studio asks students to develop new equitable typologies for a site within metro Boston that disrupts the decision making inequities that persist in making the same old built forms and typologies. Can a new set of urban design agendas and professional skills emerge from pushing for more equitable urban forms?

Through a series of exercises, students will first analyze specific case studies of American cities, through the lens of social, racial and environmental justice, and discrimination in order to expose and ‘dismantle’ conventions of urban design and planning. The second part of the studio will focus on a site in metro Boston where students will work with an outside client to design new equitable typologies, while considering the physical design of buildings, landscape, and infrastructure.

The studio, divided into two parts, will explore these questions through a series of exercises.

Part 1. ‘Dismantling’: identifying recurring moments of power in objects, voids, networks, and urban patterns across a series of cities. Dismantling requires uncovering the context and meaning behind the design of urban spaces and objects, and uncovering the mechanisms of power that produces them. Recognizing and understanding the social-political-economic powers that shape the city is critical to our understanding of the context in which we practice.

Part 2. ‘Re-visioning’: carrying a new agenda based on an understanding of how things have come to be. The act of revision on the city that is centered in questions of race and power attempts to design a more equitable and just environment. Re-visioning additionally proposes a continuous process, one that re-writes the outcome, thus emphasizing previously buried histories and provoking a different trajectory, a new path forward.

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Dismantling the City: Object, Void, Network One week, Individual Work Deliverables: (1) 10 slides for the story + (2) A composite drawing as described in paragraph 3

This exercise is meant as a first encounter between you, the city, and the studio – both literally and figuratively. In choosing your home city as a central case study, you will explore how power relations are made manifest through urban form – how historical events, policies, narratives, and periods of urban development have shaped/continue to shape the physical dimensions of a city you’ve grown familiar with. Consider manifestations of control, segregation, surveillance, and invented traditions, and how they depend on tangible features of the built environment to fulfill their ambitions. What is a power-bearing piece of the urban fabric? Where is it located? How was it built? Whose values dictated the rules that shaped it? Who was it built to serve and who was it built to repel? Has it remained frozen in time or has it acquired new relationships with a changing city? Essentially then, how can you tell the story of your city through the lens of encoded power?

In recounting this story, identify a figure-ground/object-void relationship that captures how urban narrative is constructed in tandem with physical space. Describe the figure (object or building).

What power is it aligned with (be it present or historical)? How does it perform? Describe the void.

Is it physically empty or is its blankness the result of alternative means? Has it always been a void?

How is this space maintained? Is it aligned with a different power structure than that of the figure?

How are the figure and the void linked? How do they relate to/appeal to the broader city? Are they of a similar scale or dramatically different? Have they been affected by changing regimes? Have they been co-opted for new purposes that required interventions on their original programs?

To answer these questions, you will employ a hybrid of two-dimensional projections (plan, section, elevation) and three-dimensional mediums (perspective with intended vanishing points, axonometric and/or exploded axonometric, etc.) that transcend their common purpose of depicting existing conditions and that seek to decode, de-contextualize, and extract the manifestations of power embedded within your chosen elements. As analytical drawings, these representations of power should work to dismantle the seemingly unyielding physical properties of the built environment, and produce new hierarchies and relationships. Please work with black and white line drawings only.

Suggested readings and resources: Sarah Schindler, “Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of the Built Environment,” Yale Law Journal, April 2015 Lawrence J. Vale, “Mediated Monuments and National Identity,” The Journal of Architecture 4, 1999 Peter Eisenman, Manfredo Tafuri, and Giuseppe Terragni, Giuseppe Terragni, Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques (New York, NY: Monacelli Press, 2003) Dismantling Taipei. Randy Lo

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Dismantling Nanjing. Huiwen Shi

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Dismantling Gwanghwamun Square, Seoul. Jiye Ha

Mapping the American City: Narratives of Vulnerability Two Weeks, Group Work Deliverables: 15 slides maximum, series of maps at 3 scales (1:50,000, 1:10,000, 1:1000)

In mapping the American city through its narratives of vulnerability, you will build on the lens of reading power acquired in the first assignment to identify, extrapolate, and then trace back the processes through which urban form encodes risk. Risk, broadly defined, is disproportionately experienced by urban communities. For example, historical patterns of planning and policy have made cultural racism physical by corralling Black and Brown residents neatly into harm’s way, either geographically (situating Black and Brown neighborhoods in lowlands, on infill, in close proximity to hazardous industrial uses, etc.) or by disinvestment and exclusion from formal systems of wealth and investment back into the urban fabric (redlining, racial covenants, etc.). Such decisions are perpetuated through layers of risk that place these neighborhoods at the forefront of extreme environmental hazards.

For this exercise, you will be assigned into small groups that will each work to dismantle these manifestations of risk across one of the following American cities: Baltimore, Houston, San Francisco, Washington, and Philadelphia. Recognizing that vulnerability is best revealed through a mapping of future conditions, each group will produce a series of maps at three scales (citywide/ regional, borough/township, and neighborhood) that superimpose future risk predictions (flooding, heat, capacity of the infrastructure to assimilate projected environmental changes) over socioeconomic data and urban form. These maps should work together to synthesize the narratives of vulnerability characteristic of each city. As such, each map should relate to the overarching story as does a chapter to a book, and thus work to perpetuate the story of the city while revealing what the other maps have missed. While they differ in scale, their distinctions should not simply be made manifest through precision and detail (they are not merely zoom-ins of each other), but through the specific readings of risk that each scale promotes, through explicit and multi-scalar sites of friction and injustice (these will help you move from one scale to another). It is through the nuances, rather than the clear dichotomies, that the mapping of risk transcends the mere visualization of vulnerable locations to encourage reflections on the communities that inhabit them, whether willingly or reluctantly: how did they end up here? Who decided? How did these decisions impact, or how were they impacted by, the form of the city?

Suggested readings and resources: Laura Pulido, “Geographies of Race and Ethnicity: Environmental Racism, Racial Capitalism, and State Sanctioned Violence.” Progress in Human Geography, 2016 Edward W. Soja, “On the Production of Unjust Geographies,” and “Building a Spatial Theory of Justice,” in Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 31-66 and pp. 67-110.

Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1975) Rafi Segal, Susannah Drake, “The Coast” pp. 134-172 in Four Corridors, ed. P. Lewis, G. Nordenson, C. Seavitt, Hatje Cantz; Berlin, 2019.

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Houston.

Sofia Gulaid, Randy Lo, and Yufei Chen

San Francisco.

Xuan Lan, Hugh Ebdy, Lidia Cano Pecharroman

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San Francisco.

Xuan Lan, Hugh Ebdy, Lidia Cano Pecharroman

Washington D.C. Gabriela Degetau Zanders, Huiwen Shi, and Jariyaporn Prachasartta

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Washington D.C. Gabriela Degetau Zanders, Huiwen Shi, and Jariyaporn Prachasartta

Washington D.C. Gabriela Degetau Zanders, Huiwen Shi, and Jariyaporn Prachasartta

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Dismantling Boston Two Weeks, Group Work Deliverables: 15 slides maximum, series of drawings and maps at various scales

Building on the drawing and mapping techniques introduced in the previous exercises, this assignment will engage in a critical reading of Boston both at the scale of the city and the areas relevant to defining the site in Roxbury (the studio project’s site). In three groups, students will analyze the city of Boston and its surrounding townships through three research lenses: Group 1: Environmental; the relationship between environmental systems, public open space, infrastructure, and demographic data (social, economic, race, income, etc.). Environmental layers include, but are not limited to: flooding, pollution, and temperature rise. The maps here should address various scales, from the city wide scale to the neighborhood surrounding the site in Roxbury.

Group 2: Architectural; a study of Boston’s housing typologies in relation to their historical uses from the mid-nineteenth century to the present (with a focus on case studies in and around Roxbury).

Examples of such typologies include: row houses, triple deckers, as well as low, mid, and high rise variations (choose ten case studies). Through two and three-dimensional drawings, this study should not only address these typologies as singular elements (massing, density, circulation, distribution of spaces, etc.) but should also examine their arrangements at the scale of the urban block.

Group 3: Power and Urban Narrative; by tracing the histories, stories, policies, and actions that served, facilitated, and perpetuated power and control in Boston through urban form, relating either centrally or peripherally to Roxbury. How are these stories embedded in urban form? How can we read Boston and Roxbury through them? What counter-stories emerged to dispute their narratives?

Suggested Readings & Resources: Lawrence J. Vale, Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) Resilient Boston Report, 2017 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” from Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1-14.

Göran Therborn, “Cities, Power and Modernity,” in Cities of Power: The Urban, The National, The Popular, the Global (Verso, 2017), 7-32.

Nancy S. Seasholes, Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018) Undesign the Redline Exhibition

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Environmental Lens.

Lasse Rau, Huiwen Shi, Mona VijayKumar, Xuan Lan, Lidia Cano Pecharroman

Environmental Lens.

Lasse Rau, Huiwen Shi, Mona VijayKumar, Xuan Lan, Lidia Cano Pecharroman

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Environmental Lens.

Lasse Rau, Huiwen Shi, Mona VijayKumar, Xuan Lan, Lidia Cano Pecharroman

Architectural Lens.

Jiye Ha, Yufei Chen, Randy Lo, Ziyu Xu, Jariyaporn Prachasartta

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Architectural Lens.

Jiye Ha, Yufei Chen, Randy Lo, Ziyu Xu, Jariyaporn Prachasartta

Power and Urban Narrative.

Christopher Moyer, Hugh Ebdy, Sofia Gulaid, Gabriela Degetau Zanders

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Power and Urban Narrative.

Christopher Moyer, Hugh Ebdy, Sofia Gulaid, Gabriela Degetau Zanders

Re-visioning the City: Equitable Typologies Challenge Seven Weeks, Individual or Small Groups

This seven week design project explores the equitable urban typologies challenge through a cityowned site in Roxbury. The studio will collaborate with Urbanica - a Boston based developer group to work through the history, process and various stakeholder considerations in developing the site.

Students will build on their understanding of object, void, and network as interconnected, powerencoding constituents of the built environment to imagine typological systems that position the site as part of the broader neighborhood and city at large.

A proposed urban plan will include an exploration into typological solutions that incorporate (but are not limited to): a new housing approach that organizes 120 units of different sizes (the object), a public open space (the void) that complements this housing model and further contributes to the neighborhood, and programs and/or infrastructural systems (the network) that activate and connect them. Working individually or in small groups (preferred), students will imagine new typologies that challenge existing urban patterns, forms, and what they have come to represent. http://www.bostonplans.org/projects/development-projects/tremont-crossing-(p-3) From the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan: Building a 21st Century Community “Parcel P-3 is a substantial development parcel with many possibilities. It is one of the largest parcels in the Crosstown Corridor with approximately seven acres of land and an existing building that formerly housed the Whittier Street Health Center. If fully built out, it can be an important and active link between the Reggie Lewis track facility, Ruggles Station, Parcel 18, and other newer developments in Lower Roxbury along Tremont Street. Its close proximity to the Ruggles Street MBTA rapid transit and commuter rail stop makes it an ideal location to implement Transit Oriented Development principles. Because of its scale and prominence and widespread interest in the future development of this site, it has been studied in more detail in the following paragraphs. There is already considerable interest in developing Parcel P-3 and it will likely be one of the Request for Qualifications or Proposals to be guided by the goals and objectives of the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan. Although there is no consensus during the planning process around the specific uses to be developed on Parcel P-3, it is generally agreed that it should be a mix of uses that serve first and foremost the needs of the Roxbury community. Some of the uses include residential units of diverse types and sizes with an affordable component that target home ownership. The parcel should also have retail uses with locally owned stores that provide services to local residents such as supermarket, laundry facility, restaurant and day care center. Some office and commercial would also be appropriate as an employment generator. Through the RFP process, it is anticipated that creative ideas for additional cultural entertainment as well as community uses might also emerge.

Because of this site’s close proximity to Ruggles Station and the substantial scale and density of the nearby Whittier Street housing project, the Police Headquarters Building, the Renaissance Park Office Building, the parking garage on Parcel 18 and the Madison Park and John D. O’Bryant High Schools, this site could and should accommodate high-density development. The important caveat is that off-street parking be kept at a minimum.”

General Requirements for the project: FAR 2 (+/- 10%). Site Coverage 50% (+/- 10%). Parking 0.5/unit (or more/less).

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The Site: Tremont Crossing (P-3)

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IN THE FIELD, WE ARE MANY: RETHINKING NON-COHERENCE Lasse Rau and Jariyaporn Prachasartta

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RENEWING THE URBAN Sofia Gulaid, Christopher Moyer, and Hugh Ebdy

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GROW: SHARING PRODUCTIVE CLUSTERS Xuan Lan, Huiwen Shi, and Jiye Ha

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TERRACESCAPE Randy Lo

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[CO]MMUNE Gabriela Degetau Zanders and Mona VijayKumar

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