Whitesides Thesis 2016

CALLE RASCUACHE A s h l e y W h ite s id e s

Un d erg ra duate Thesis Di rector Dar ren Petr uc c i Sp ri n g 2 0 16

one has a stance that is both defiant “ Inandrasquachismo, inventive. Aesthetic expression comes from

discards, fragments, even recycled everyday materials such as tires, broken plates, plastic containers, which are recombined with elaborate and bold display in yard shrines (capillas), domestic decor (altares), and even embellishment of the car. In its broadest sense, it is a combination of resistant and resilient attitudes devised to allow the Chicano to survive and persevere with a sense of dignity. The capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado is at the heart of rasquachismo.

Amalia Mesa-Bains

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CONTENTS THESIS 5 INTRODUCTION 7 History of Central City South 8 Central City South Today 10 EVERYDAY URBANISM 15 Case Studies 19 BIOMIMICRY 25 Case Studies 27 METHODOLOGY 31 Position 31 Understanding Site Identity 32 Site Elements 33 Constituents and Needs 38 Manifestation 40 BIBLIOGRAPHY 57

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THESIS Promoted by the city to increase land values and provide jobs in the barrios of South Phoenix, industry became a force of massive disturbance along Buckeye Road, interrupting the residential scale with large industrial lots, many of which have been abandoned.

However, latent in the landscape are remnants of better times in the vibrant gestures of everyday urbanism.

Inspired by this palate of lively, idiosyncratic street designs—created out of necessity by people making-do—this project seeks to bring identity, value, and vitality to this challenging human environment.

This project uses concepts and processes of disturbance ecology and ecological succession, specifically the role played by pioneer species and biological legacies in the immediate aftermath of the eruption of Mount St. Helens, to develop an urban revitalization plan for Buckeye Road.

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INTRODUCTION

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CENTRAL CITY SOUTH, PHOENIX Central City South, a collection of neighborhoods in Phoenix, south of the Southern Pacific Railroad track, has a long-standing reputation for being one of the worst and poorest areas in Phoenix, known for its high poverty levels, crime, and largely Latino population.

HISTORY OF CENTRAL CITY SOUTH In the founding years of Phoenix’s history, Mexicans made up approximately half of the city’s population, but within a few years had become marginalized by the rapidly increasing Anglo population. “Mexicans were, almost from the city’s founding in 1870, marginalized and excluded in most economic sectors, being relegated primarily to field work in local agricultural production”1 When the Southern Pacific Railroad was built in 1887, bisecting south Phoenix, it brought with it an influx of white Americans2 and became a “dividing line between Anglo Phoenix and the southern subaltern district… serving as both the physical and symbolic boundary between two developing urban worlds”3. The great Flood of 1891, when the salt river, which runs through south Phoenix overflowed its banks, confirmed the idea that white Americans should live on the higher grounds north of the tracks, leaving the impoverished Mexican Americans to reside in the agricultural flood plain south of the tracks4, much of which remained outside the city limits of Phoenix until 1 2 3 4

Bob Bolin, “The Geography of Despair”(2005),163 Bradford Luckingham, Minorities in Phoenix, 1994, Bob Bolin, “The Geography of Despair”(2005),158 Bradford Luckingham, Minorities in Phoenix, 1994, 25

1960. The lack of political jurisdiction in the South Phoenix neighborhoods resulted in relaxed land use regulations and underdeveloped utilities and infrastructural services5. This division of Anglos and Latinos resulted in discrimination and segregation that “went from the church, parks, schools, hotels, theaters—the whole spectrum of rights”6. Over time “discrimination and segregation imposed by the larger population, the combination of cheap land and housing, nonexistent or weak building codes, shared language and fold customs, ties to family and friends, and the need for an identity with the homeland and a bridge to American society drew residents to Phoenix’s barrios”7.

Up until the early 1900s, South Phoenix consisted mostly of crowded, impoverished, Latino neighborhoods. Approximately half of Phoenix’s Latino population was crammed into 15 percent of Phoenix’s neighborhoods8. However, the combination of lax land use regulations, proximity to the rail road tracks, and low land values in the area made south Phoenix a magnet for industrial, warehousing, and stockyard activity”9. With little regard for the well-documented poor housing conditions, high unemployment rates, and unregulated pollution by industries in the area, the city promoted the advantages of Phoenix’s industrial district to attract industry well into the 1960’s10 with the idea that “general development meant economic opportunities and a more prosperous future for 5 Bob Bolin, “The Geography of Despair”(2005),159 6 Bradford Luckingham, Minorities in Phoenix, 1994, 40 7 Ibid.

8 Ibid, 58.

9 Bob Bolin, “The Geography of Despair”(2005),159 10 Ibid.

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Central City South 1949

Central City South 20011 1 Map. http://gis.maricopa.gov/MapApp/GIO/AerialHistorical/index.html.

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the area”11, and “by the 1950s it was reported that three quarters of Phoenix’s 1000 manufacturing facilities were within two kilometers of the railroad”12.

This large influx of industry became a force of massive destruction in South Phoenix, replacing the important, albeit impoverished, residential scale with wide expanses of industrial land, breaking up the neighborhood communities that Mexican Americans relied on for support. “Between 1980 and 1990 alone, 40% of residential land in the area was converted to industrial use”13. Yet it failed to provide much-needed jobs because businesses often brought employees with them14. Regardless of the obvious failures of the industrial development strategy, “there have been no official actions to discourage such land uses…in the case of some neighborhoods, zoning has been used to eliminate residential uses all together”15.

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Bradford Luckingham, Minorities in Phoenix, 1994, 25 Bob Bolin, “The Geography of Despair”(2005)163 Ibid, 165 Bradford Luckingham, Minorities in Phoenix, 1994, 66 Ibid.

CENTRAL CITY SOUTH TODAY Although segregation has been banned and discrimination is less prevalent, South Phoenix’s population has remained predominantly Latino and impoverished, and the condition of the area can be described quite accurately by the same words Andy Zipser, a well-known reporter, used to describe it in 1983:

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For rent signs are everywhere, some posted on homes that are merely on tired and untidy, others that verge on collapse. A few of the houses are only memories, marked by gravestone pilings or a rectangle foundation, broken glass glittering like sequins on the broken ground. The dirt alleys that bisect each block turn to mud at just a kiss of rain. Graffiti is omnipresent, the distinctive, diamond-shaped letters sprayed on trash containers, telephone poles, stop signs, buildings that have been abandoned and buildings that are still occupied 16

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16 Bradford Luckingham, Minorities in Phoenix, 1994, 67

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Residents of Central City South live on a median income of $17,46317, leaving 45.7% of the population below the federal poverty line18. Over 76 percent of the population of Central South Phoenix is Hispanic.

Education levels are extremely low; less than 43.5% of the population has high school degree, leaving 85% of the head of households working wage jobs19.

A look around the neglected area only highlights these statistics, with run-down buildings, vacant lots sprouting weeds, and bus stop signs devoid of seating or shade where one man stated what others likely think, “they don’t care about us. We’re just public.”

(which is still being used and maintained), and a mixed use community.

In 2008 community members gathered to create a plan to revitalize the area which resulted in the creation of a handful of parks, two of which are now dilapidated and void of life; a multifunctional community center; a library; a community garden

The narrow, four-foot sidewalks result in uncomfortable confrontations with the few vagabond recycling collectors, toting garbage bags full of empty plastic containers and glass bottles, and the occasional person waiting at the bus stop. The narrowness of the sidewalks is accented by the fivelane street they boarder and the openness of the many vacant lots and empty parking lots. Historical photographs of the vacant buildings, with their nowboarded-up windows and doors reveal the challenge of staying in business in an area with so little

17 Phoenix Revitalization Corporation, LinkedIn, Publication, October 2015, Accessed January 14, 2016.

18 “South Phoenix Neighborhood in Phoenix, Arizona (AZ),” City-Data. com, Accessed February 5, 2016.

19 Charles Bruner, and Syed Noor, Young Children of South Phoenix, Ensuring Healthy Growth and Development, Report, (December 2010), Accessed January 14, 2016.

This revitalization effort focused on creating destination spots within the community. However, all of these new community spaces are set off from the street—you have to know that they’re there in order to find them—and none are place specific.

They have been designed the same way they would have been had they been built in any neighborhood in Phoenix, and consequently, their main commercial strip, Buckeye Road, remains desolate and uninviting to pedestrians.

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Street section

pedestrian life, and the strategies that the remaining open businesses and street vendors employ indicate the level of creativity and ingenuity that is necessary in such a challenging business environment.

A more successful approach to activating this latent commercial corridor would be to consider the ways that residents are making-do along Buckeye Road as a network of design methods to apply to a design that can grow and change over time to accommodate the needs and wants of the community at various time scales from the course of a day to years in the future, as well as provide a distinct identity to bring value to Buckeye Road and the surrounding area.

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EVERYDAY URBANISM Everyday Urbanism is a concept that’s hard to define.

Margaret Crawford, one of the first people who used the term, describes it as “an approach to urbanism that finds its meaning in everyday life, but in an everyday life that always turns out to be far more than just the ordinary and banal routines that we all experience”1.

It’s not the kind of urbanism designed by city planners and architects that conjure up visions of skyscrapers and city skylines, but the kind designed by ordinary city residents in everyday spaces. Everyday space is the “connective tissue that binds daily lives together, amorphous and so pervasive that it is difficult even to perceive”2. It’s the in-between spaces of the city that so often go overlooked, like streets, sidewalks, areas underneath and between highway overpasses, and the like. And it’s what ordinary people do with these spaces that turn the ordinary into much more than just ordinary: it’s a product of the creative ingenuity that results from necessity. Crawford states that it’s far more than just the ordinary because “it 1 Rahul Mehrotra, Everyday Urbanism: Margaret Crawford Vs. Michael Speaks, (Ann Arbor, Mich: Univ. of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture, 2005), 32.

2 John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski, Everyday Urbanism: Featuring John Chase, (New York, N.Y.: Monacelli Press, 1999), 25.

begins with what already exists and encourages the amplification of everyday life”3. For example, an ordinary abandoned lot in an urban neighborhood could be transformed into a neighborhood garden if residents believe that the space can be better used as a garden than a potential development, or a fence can be transformed into display shelves for pop-up vendors who don’t have the money to rent a space from which to vend.

3 A. Taybron, (2012). Designing mixed-income communities: Comparing new urbanism and everyday urbanism to narratives and lessons learned from three design teams of three HOPE VI projects (Order No. 533467). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, 11.

Everyday space under an overpass1.

1 Kristina Corre, (August 1, 2014). Playful Urbanism: Ottawa ‘sets the

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Broom Fence2.

Because of the lack of top-down regulation “it has little pretense about the perfectibility of the built environment,” It is not “about utopian form. But it is idealistic about social equity and citizen participation, especially for disadvantaged populations. It is grassroots and populist”4. It has been described by many people as a bottom-up approach to urbanism, but as Margaret Crawford argues, it’s not really bottom-up because it never gets to the “up”5.

Designers in general are taught to concern themselves so much with ideas of how cities “ought to work and what ought to be good for people and businesses within them”, but these ideas render them “unable to appreciate the intricate reality of urban life and of streets”6, so these top down approaches to urbanism, which design “rational, technical, [and] standardized solution[s], tend to generalize and marginalize people altogether—they aren’t considered, consulted, or 4 Taybron, Designing mixed-income communities, 11.

5 Mehrotra, Everyday Urbanism: Margaret Crawford Vs. Michael Speaks, 36.

6 Michael D. Gordin, Tilley, Helen, and Prakash, Gyan, eds, Utopia/Dystopia : Conditions of Historical Possibility, (Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press, 2010), Accessed January 24, 2016, 205. ProQuest ebrary.

respected as individuals, families, or communities”7.

In contrast, the everyday urbanism shift from the professional to the everyday person8 allows for a much greater level of equality to be reached based on the idea that “urban spaces negate all differences”9. Everyday spaces have no admission charge; they are open to the public at all times, with no discrimination on who uses them. There are no “no shirt, no shoes, no service” signs, no locked gates. Although there is a risk factor involved due to the fact that vending in these everyday spaces is technically illegal based on zoning codes, they offer vendors free, if risky, rent and the opportunity to have little to no overhead cost. They are appealing to the everyday person because they are “infinitely flexible” and easily modified to suit the needs of the user, and the use of these spaces not only helps the perpetrators, but also the innocent passerby in that they “humanize the street” and “encourage diverse social encounters”10. In this way, everyday urbanism holds the power to alter the significance of spaces or common objects, and if enough vendors appropriate a space regularly enough, they can alter the zoning and thus the legality of events in the space“11.

This "multiplicity and heterogeneity is based on its ability to shift and take shape in response to different activities and circumstances”12. For example, “a shopping cart means very different things to a busy mother in a supermarket and a homeless person on the sidewalk”13. In one instance the shopping cart 7 Dobbins, Urban Design and People, 144.

8 Chase, Everyday Urbanism, 12.

9 Ibid, 10.

10 Ibid, 118.

11 Ibid, 34.

12 Taybron, Designing mixed-income communities, 17.

13 Chase, Everyday Urbanism, 11.

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can be merely a tool for easily toting groceries or children around, and in the next it can be someone’s storage unit and an indication to the rest of the world of how little they have. The shopping cart could also mean something completely different to a vendor. It could serve as the vending station, full of fresh fruits or other goods and set up next to the sidewalk at a busy intersection awaiting the attention of pedestrians waiting for the crosswalk light.

Photos

Busy mother with shopping cart3.

Homeless man with shopping cart4

1 Kristina Corre, (August 1, 2014). Playful Urbanism: Ottawa ‘sets the Stage’, Ottawa.

2 James Rojas, Broom Fence. (Accessed February 28, 2016).

3 (March 11, 2014), By BurntApple, 4 August 12, 2011. http://www.multiplemayhemmamma.com/2011/08/ grocery-shopping-kids.html#sthash.0TVKXyVD.dpbs.

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Although everyday urbanism is based on a bottomup process, the possibility exists that a formal design attitude can be beneficial if, at the same time, there is “enough flexibility within that formal design approach to allow inspiration by the informal”14. If this approach is to be successful, the designer needs to recognize that residents are an “integral part in city design”15 and that in order for a community to be functional and self-sustainable, the “stamp of the people, their footprints on their places, must show in their streets, their houses, where they gather, shop, work, and relax.” If the design of a place is designed for a generic population where one design is expected to fit all, people will be much less likely to want to try to make it their own16.

One of the main spaces that need to be addressed as public space is the streets and circulation routes.

According to Dobbins, circulatory infrastructure takes up approximately a quarter of available land19, and they’re incredibly important to social interactions.

Henri Lefebvre, the influential French sociologist whose 1949 book The Critique of Everyday Life is the starting point for everyday urbanism critiques, argued that “the street is more than a channel for circulation. It is a vital place for meetings, encounters, interactions, communication, and spontaneous theater”20. The pedestrian-desolate streets of Phoenix cheat citizens out of the chance encounters and experiences that cannot be found in the workplace or the home.

A collaborative and cooperative approach to design that integrates community members into the design process will challenge designers to think in a broader context than is typically taught. So much emphasis is placed on designing for private activities since so much of people’s time is spent in privately owned residences and workplaces that “the idea of how to design the spaces in between, whether for access or gathering, has tended to fall through the cracks”17 and what is left over after the private sector is designed becomes the civic space, which now needs to be recognized as a design opportunity, and not just in a “prettying up places here and there in the city” way. The civic space needs to address the “serious business of larger policy and equity issues that could actually make cities better”18.

In a pedestrian filled street, “the street embodies the everyday in condensed form, with more life than the places it links together”21. It has all of the disorder of urban life that is missing from the well regulated and orderly systems found elsewhere in the city; “this disorder is alive. It informs. It surprises”22.

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Taybron, Designing mixed-income communities, 16.

Chase, Everyday Urbanism, 97.

Dobbins, Urban Design and People, 69.

Ibid, 170.

Ibid, 171.

19 Dobbins, Urban Design and People, 142.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid, 217.

22 Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 18-19.

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CASE STUDIES The everyday urbanism case studies that I have collected for this project are examples of the creative ingenuity currently displayed along a portion of Buckeye Road between Central Avenue and 19th Avenue where I have focused my research. Because everyday urbanism is so specific to place, I have chosen to focus on examples from Buckeye Road rather than looking at examples of everyday urbanism elsewhere

and to consider these examples as a lexicon of the kinds of activities that should be allowed to continue happening on the street as place-specific typologies of urbanism that can be considered a network of methods to apply to my project.

MOBILE VENDING MACHINE Unregulated food sales with a limited variety and quantity of goods

INFORMAL FLEA MARKET Outdoor market where vendors sell secondhand goods

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OPAQUE STOREFRONT Secure and blocked-off facade

SCRAP METAL SIGN Displaying business-specific scrap parts as unofficial signage

DRIVE THRU STORE A store that motorists can browse through without leaving their car

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MOBILE BUS STOP Signs indicating where the bus will stop to pick up passengers, can move depending on the day

FENCE STOREFRONT Fence that displays goods to people on the street and provides security

RETAIL MUSEUM Designed display of cultural artifacts

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POP-UP CRAIG’S LIST Temporary unregulated sales appropriating everyday space

CATALOG FACADE Store facade that informs motorists on the street of the contents of the store

RETAIL PORCH Transitional space that allows people on the street to interact with the more private activities of the business

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BIOMIMICRY Biomimicry is a relatively new and increasingly popular field of study that Janine Benyus, Co-founder of the Biomimicry Institute, elegantly describes as the “conscious emulation of life’s genius”1. She goes on to explain that biomimicry is a design process—a way of seeking solutions—in which the designer defines a challenge functionally…seeks out a local organism or ecosystem that is the champion of that function, and then begins a conversation: how are you doing what I want to do? And how might I emulate your design?”2 This strategy to ask nature for solutions is based on the principle that, like the people who engage in everyday urbanism, in order to survive the 3.8 billion years on a finite planet, “nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved the problems we are struggling to solve”3 in order to maintain the balance and perform at its maximum efficiency4 designers can use biomimicry as a tool for problem solving everything from form to process, to systems challenges. However, it is important for

designers to realize that biomimicry is “not slavish mimicry; it’s taking the design principles, the genius of the natural world, and learning from it.”5

A biomimetic design process can take a “life’s principles approach or a forms/processes/systems approach”7 This project uses both approaches, drawing inspiration from the concepts and processes of disturbance ecology and ecological succession demonstrated at Mount St. Helens as well as the biomimicry principle “be locally attuned

1 Janine Benyus, quoted in Alice Liao, Q & A: Janine Benyus, BIOMIMICRY GUILD, Kitchen & Bath business 54, no. 7 (2007).

2 Ibid, 29.

3 Janine M Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, (New York: Perennial, 2002).

4 A World of Solutions, The Biomimicry Institute

5 Films Media Group, (2007,) TEDTalks: Janine benyus--12 sustainable design ideas from natureTED. 6 “Life’s Principles.” Biomimicry 38. 2014.

7 “Comments on Honors Thesis.” E-mail message to author. April 28, 2016.

Biomimicry 3.8, has formalized these design principles in a set of strategies known as Life’s Principles, which represent the “overarching patterns found amongst the species surviving and thriving on Earth”6. These strategies include: adapt to changing conditions, be locally attuned and responsive, use life-friendly chemicals, be resource efficient, integrate development with growth, and evolve to survive.

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Mount St. Helens the day before the eruption, 19801

and responsive”, specifically the subcategory of using readily available materials, as does the caddis fly and bowerbird.

CASE STUDIES MOUNT ST. HELENS On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted, dislodging the north slope of the mountain in three successive landslides that flooded the Toutle River Valley8, filling it up to 150 feet and destroying the landscape in a vast area around the volcano. A blast of superheated pyroclastic material followed, searing laterally into the surrounding landscape, decimating the old growth forest with winds and debris up to 1,560 degrees. 143 square miles of trees were flattened to the ground and other 42 square miles of trees were scorched by the hot winds . The post-eruption landscape “gave the impression of total lifelessness,” said Virginia Dale, one of the first ecologists to fly over the eruption site after the event.

8 Heidi Fischer, “Collaborating with Chance: The Aeronauts of Mount St. Helens.” Zygote Quarterly, 2016th ser., 1 (2016): 56.

Devastation post eruption19792

Similarly to Mount St. Helens, Buckeye road can be considered a disturbed, or nutrient-poor, landscape with the industrialization of the area acting as the agent of disturbance. The way in which Mount St. Helens has begun to regrow can provide insights and suggesting strategies for bringing life to Buckeye Road.

The successional growth on Mount St. Helens started out with two types of species: the survivors and the pioneers. Survivors included plants that were able to regenerate from roots, saplings that had been protected by the snow that was on the mountain when the eruption happened, animals like the northern pocket gopher that were still hibernating underground in May. Pioneer species are the species that have the ability to take root in disturbed landscapes like Mount St. Helens, and “enrich impoverished conditions, allowing other organisms…to gain a toehold over time”9. The first spotted pioneer plant was the Prairie 9 “Comments on Honors Thesis.” E-mail message to author. April 28, 2016.

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Mount St. Helens 20133

Lupine, which is typically grows at higher elevations in the area and is believed to have traveled downstream to the pumice plains. This blue flowering plant was able to grow in the nutrient-poor, ash covered pumice plain because it carries a nitrogen fixing bacteria in its root system that allows the plant to turn the unusable nitrogen in the air into nitrogen the plant can use.

The prairie lupine acted as a catalyst of growth by “providing a whole suite of amenities—wind traps for seeds, arthropods, [and] blowing sediments” that created habitable microclimates with “shade, soil nutrients, some moisture, [and] habitat structures… for a variety of organisms” such as pocket gophers and insects10.

This project creates a type of pioneer species for Buckeye Road, in the form of butler buildings that can support a variety of new and existing activities that will bring value and vitality to the street and surrounding neighborhoods.

10 “Comments on Honors Thesis.” E-mail message to author. April 28, 2016.

Vagelkop gardner bowerbird nest4

MALE VAGELKOP GARDNER BOWERBIRD The male vagelkop gardener bowerbird makes up for

a poor singing voice by decorating his nest. He first

builds the nest and then collects and rearranges eyecatching objects in his territory into piles according to color and uses them to adorn the entrance to his nest and attract females. These piles contain objects that range from fruits to trash individually, but appear strikingly beautiful as a collection11.

This is an example of the Life’s Principle “be locally attuned and responsive”, specifically the subcategory of using readily available materials. It is also an example of being resource efficient, another Life’s Principle, by using waste as a resource. Both of these Life’s Principles can be used in this project, using the bowerbird as inspiration for taking materials found on site and relating to the site to keep the project cheap and responsive to the existing identity of the street, while elevating the beauty that can be perceived and allowing visitors and residents to see the latent value in Buckeye Road.

11 Arndt, Ingo, and Jürgen Tautz. Animal Architecture. Abrams, Harry N., 2013.

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CADDIS FLY Caddis fly larvae fashion a protective casing out of shells, seeds, and other detritus that they encounter as they float down rivers12. These casings are intriguingly beautiful examples of using readily available materials and can be used as an example for how existing site materials that could be considered cheap and undesirable or trashy on their own can be used to create something that adds up to much more than the individual parts.

12 Arndt, Ingo, and JuĚˆrgen Tautz. Animal Architecture. Abrams, Harry N., 2013.

Photos 1 Glicken, Harry. Mount St. Helens. May 17, 1980. USGS. 2 Devistation. July 17, 1980. http://dofbill.com/category/mt-st-helens/.

3Behring, Natalie. Mount St. Helens Hike, The Columbian. http://www. columbian.com/photos/galleries/2015/07/01/mount-st-helens-hike/.

4 Arndt, Ingo. April 22, 2014. Animal Archtecture. Abrams, Harry N. 5 Ibid.

Caddis Fly Casing1

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METHODOLOGY POSITION The city’s promotion of industry in Central City South Phoenix has been a force of massive disturbance along Buckeye Road, interrupting a once readable rhythm of residential lot boundaries with large combined lots left vacant or used for light or commercial-industrial purposes—zoning intended for moderate scale and intensity industrial and business uses such as large scale repair shops, towing and storage facilities, and retail services—within an area zoned for commercial use.

Although Buckeye Road is intended to be one of the main commercial streets in Central city South, Buckeye Road now appears to be dull and void of life, inhospitable to pedestrian life. The lack of a human presence along the street results in a challenging business environment that either compounds the problem by driving away businesses or forces business owners and other residents to be creative and make-do with what they have available. This can be seen in the way that merchants fashion signage out of the very materials they sell, the way that

vendors appropriate spaces that they don’t own in order to sell their merchandise without the capital costs of renting a building, and the way that business owners create more workable space for themselves in the harsh climate.

These vibrant gestures of everyday urbanism are remnants of better times. This project aims to bring awareness to these often overlooked instances of creative ingenuity and begin to affirm some of these gestures as acceptable practices in order to bring value to these activities that do so much to bring vitality to this challenging human environment.

Providing a flexible, multifunctional design that can be a type of urban pioneer species that encourages everyday urbanism and makes grander, communityscale gestures, such as theaters, performance venues, swap meets, etc. possible, can allow the everyday urbanism to give the impression of appropriateness and belonging that it currently lacks and result in a much more positive identity for Buckeye Road.

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UNDERSTANDING SITE IDENTITY In order to expose the value of the everyday urbanism of Buckeye Road, a careful investigation of the identity of the site must be conducted.

I knew very little about Buckeye Road, and South Phoenix in general, so I began this process by taking a preliminary visit to the site before conducting any research. This allowed me to formulate a personal and unbiased opinion of the site. My initial response and findings as well as the subsequent research into the history and demographics of Central City South are documented in the introduction section of this paper.

I followed up this initial visit with multiple supplementary visits to gain an understanding of the culture and atmosphere of Buckeye Road and its tactics on a more specific scale than the scale of my research. From these site visits, I formed a collection of reoccurring elements, which define the character and identity of the site in the way that they are used and appropriated repeatedly. These elements often fall into several categories; for example, a facade or a fence can also act as signage and color.

The site elements provide a palate of materials and colors to use in the design. They also indicate the presents of four distinct constituents of the street, each with specific needs that each of the site elements embody.

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SITE ELEMENTS FACADES

SIGNAGE

The interface between a building and its environment/users

Informs people on the street of the building’s function

SIGNAGE

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FENCES

WALLS

A human scale barrier a person could see through

Barrier for circulation and sight

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BOLLARDS

RAMADAS

Barrier for vehicles but permeable to people

Sheltering and shading cars or people as an extension of the building

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COLOR Used to decorate, stand out, and advertise

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COLOR PALATE

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CONSTITUENTS AND NEEDS THE MUNICIPALITY

LAND OWNERS

The municipality owns and maintains the public zone and public infrastructure such as telephone lines, street lights, bus stops and services, sidewalks, and the street.

Land owners build and maintain permanent structures, such as houses, some fencing, and pavement on private land and often rent out the properties.

NEEDS

• Infrastructure that can house telephone wires • Adequate street lighting • Bus stops with seating

NEEDS • Affordable materials and construction • Rentable space • Property security • Ability to screen areas of the site to allow scrap and junk piles to be concealed, if necessary

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OCCUPIERS

APPROPRIATORS

Occupiers rent the properties that land owners own and can construct temporary structures on private land. Tenants typically do not want to invest large amounts of money in these structures since they do not own the land and many of these temporary structures may not meet code requirements.

Appropriators apply programs and activities to available and underutilized land that they do not own, which is illegal to do. This includes activities such as selling goods in parking lots.

NEEDS

NEEDS

• Visibly permeable perimeter boundary such as a fence so that goods can be displayed without compromising security • Places to display signage

• Places to hang objects for sale • Flexible structure useful for many different activities and uses

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MANIFESTATION Through an investigation of historical aerial photographs of a series of case study lots along Buckeye Road, the devastating impact that industrialization had on the relatively dense, albeit impoverished, residential neighborhood can clearly and shockingly read.

As light industrial use moves into the area, residences rapidly disappear.

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BUCKEYE RD.

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1949

1982

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2001

2013

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Although the previous residential conditions were marginalized and impoverished, the residential density along the street promoted community ties and served as a much better model of urbanism than the streetscape that resulted from industrialization.

Today, the street is zoned as commercial, with adjacent residential lots on either side, yet so much of the street is left vacant or dedicated to light industrial uses. The few businesses surviving along buckeye rely heavily on advertising to automobile traffic, since pedestrian traffic is severely lacking, and those businesses which fail to assert themselves to passing car traffic ultimately do poorly. However, even the most flamboyant businesses seem to be perpetually void of customers because nobody is readily available to peek into the local shops from their cars.

This project suggests creating a new urban model, created by inserting new infrastructure—butler buildings—over each existing lot, which will pioneer the landscape of Buckeye Road and allow the site to evolve into a new typology for urbanism. These simple, framework structures will bring back a hint of the residential, human scale that existed prior to industrialization, by demarcating property boundaries and breaking up the expansiveness of vacant and industrial lots, while still allowing the industrial uses that give the street its identity to continue. By omitting the building envelope that typically encases butler buildings, the structure is left open to enable a variety of new and existing activities and the possibility for larger scale appropriations that will bring value and vitality to the street and surrounding neighborhoods.

The butler buildings exemplify the Life’s Principle of being locally attuned and responsive because they

are cheap, off the shelf and readily available, and are site appropriate due to their industrial appearance.

They can be erected independently; one lot at a time, by land owners as scaffolding for building residences above the industrial lots, which would allow land owners to bring in supplemental income. They will also incorporate city infrastructure, such as street lighting, telephone lines, and bus stops, and can therefore be subsidized by the city government to be even more affordable for land owners. The height of the butler building is shorter than the existing street lights, so they will provide better and more regular lighting for pedestrians. Land owners can install things like overhead security grilles along the street edge of the butler building to provide a secure boundary for the property, but can install them so that the door juts out into the street when opened, creating shade as well as places for pop-up vendors to hang goods.

The human occupation of the second level of the street, in conjunction with shade the and new opportunities for appropriation in the spaces below, will have a pioneering effect on the landscape, attracting additional pedestrians to Buckeye Road and giving the street a 24-hour human presence which will not only increase street activity and support the local businesses, but also increase safety.

The butler building framework will provide a way for residents of Buckeye Road to show that they can thrive, despite the disturbance of industry. Their creative ingenuity will be allowed and encouraged as a revitalization strategy to bring identity, value, and vitality to Buckeye road.

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Palimpsest of 1949 and 2013 conditions

Erection of Butler Building Frame

Figure ground drawing

Insertion of units

Reverse figure ground drawing that is translated into housing units

Completion of roof

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MORNING

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The provisional infrastructure of the butler building can be used in different ways depending on the time of day, user, and season. In the morning while people are getting ready to leave for work or sleeping, there may be very little activity, with the exception of a few people waiting for the bus or an old lady watering her flowers, or the shop owners opening the gates

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AFTERNOON

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By mid-day a pop-up vendor may come and hang the clothing he’s selling from the overhead doors that protrude over the sidewalk to shade him. A family might walk by and allow their kids to swing on the makeshift tire swing while the parents buy some new clothes from the vendor.

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NIGHT

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When the Auto shop is closed for the night, the property may take on an entirely new function and become a cultural venue like an open-air movie theater where people sit on platforms suspended from the ceiling that double as workbenches and storage shelves for the mechanics during the day.

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5 YEARS IN THE FUTURE

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Several years in the future, the lady living above the auto shop might utilize the large balcony adjacent to her apartment to start a nursery business, and her neighbor may decide to paint a mural on his apartment wall. The vendor that set shop 5 years ago may have attracted other vendors who wished to sell their goods as well and a swap meet might form that uses the auto shop’s land when it’s not in use.

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10 YEARS IN THE FUTURE

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Ten years in the future, if might be time for a new paint job and the mural might be fading, but the swap meet might have proven to be very successful and taken over the auto shop’s space full time. The gardener lady living above the auto shop might have negotiated to use some of the space below to sell her plants during the day, and the light industrial auto shop might begin to fade into the background.

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